Mapping pathways to public understanding of climate science

Abstract

Climate communication is a thriving research area spanning science, social science, and humanities. The field has grown explosively in recent years, necessitating increased efforts to synthesize and make sense of the resulting profusion of studies. To support scholars navigating this quickly evolving knowledge domain, we developed a knowledge map of the climate communication research landscape by applying network analysis and data visualization techniques to the metadata from 2995 publications on climate communication. The map reveals a dense web of connections among five distinct knowledge communities, indicating a tightly knit and intensely collaborative knowledge domain, and suggests new avenues for the application of climate communication knowledge, in particular to support climate services and co-production. The climate communication knowledge map answers the call for synoptic perspectives on areas of science communication while demonstrating a novel visual approach to knowledge synthesis for science communication domains.