Database of the article "The science of doubt: when climate sceptics cite science against itself"

Published: 1 July 2026| Version 1 | DOI: 10.17632/y22bzt8pvb.1
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Description

This Excel workbook contains the data, tables and rankings in the analysis of the scientific papers shared in the two reference subreddits of the climate-change debate: r/climateskeptics and r/Climatechange. The workbook uses three recurring labels: "PAPERS" for the articles themselves, "AUTHORS" for their authors, and "JOURNALS" for the journals in which they appeared. Each worksheet name carries a suffix denoting the subsample: "_only_ce" for papers cited exclusively in r/climateskeptics, "_only_cli" for papers cited exclusively in r/Climatechange, and "_common" for papers cited in both subreddits. "Cites_ce" and "Cites_cli" count the number of posts in which a paper, author or journal was mentioned in r/climateskeptics and r/Climatechange, respectively. The workbook contains 12 worksheets: "1. Materials and descriptives" — subreddit characteristics, and users and cited papers statistics. "2. PAPERS_only_ce" — DOI, title, author(s), journal, year and citing-post count ("Cites_ce") for the 1,204 papers cited exclusively in r/climateskeptics. "3. PAPERS_common" — same fields for the 557 papers shared by both subreddits, with counts for each ("Cites_ce", "Cites_cli"). "4. PAPERS_only_cli" — same fields for the 2,042 papers cited exclusively in r/Climatechange, with counts in "Cites_cli". "5. AUTHORS_only_ce" — the 6,147 authors cited exclusively in r/climateskeptics, linked to their Scopus profiles: "Papers" = number of papers by that author; "%" = percentage of the subset's papers authored or co-authored by that author; "Cites_ce" = total posts mentioning the author. "6. AUTHORS_common" — same fields for the 3,105 authors in papers shared by both subreddits; "%" over the 557 shared papers; counts for both subreddits ("Cites_ce", "Cites_cli"). "7. AUTHORS_only_cli" — same fields for the 10,929 authors cited exclusively in r/Climatechange; "%" over the 2,042 papers; "Cites_cli" = total posts mentioning the author. "8. JOURNALS_only_ce" — the 316 journals publishing papers cited exclusively in r/climateskeptics: "%" = that journal's share of the subset's 1,204 papers; "Cites_ce" = total citing posts for that journal's papers. "9. JOURNALS_common" — same fields for the 113 journals shared by both subreddits; "%" over the 557 papers; counts for both subreddits ("Cites_ce", "Cites_cli"). "10. JOURNALS_only_cli" — same fields for the 371 journals cited exclusively in r/Climatechange; "Cites_cli" = total citing posts for that journal's papers. "11. AltmetricVsScopus_ce" — the 166 outlier papers from r/climateskeptics combining below-median Scopus citations with above-median Altmetric Attention Scores, i.e. papers attracting more online attention than their academic visibility would predict. Fields: DOI, title, author(s), journal, year, Altmetric Attention Score (a weighted measure of online attention from news, social media and other sources) and Scopus citation count. "12. AltmetricVsScopus_cli" — the equivalent 300 outlier papers for r/Climatechange.

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Climate Change, Bibliometrics

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