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On 5th December 2012, a scientific article reviewing a change in the feeding behaviour of the European catfish, one of the largest freshwater fish, was published in the American scientific journal, PLOS ONE, an open access journal, which also allows the mass publication of pictures and videos. Within a few days following the publication of this article, it was relayed by numerous web sites and generated a media craze. In this paper, we analyse the circulation of this scientific information in the sphere of Web-based media during the two months following its publication, by revealing the citation mechanisms of the original article and the logic of the Internet users participating in its diffusion. In addition, since the circulation of its informational content travelled beyond linguistic and geographical boundaries, we chose to compare the citation modalities and intertextual relationships of documents in the three countries where the article spread the most widely, namely: France, the United States and Great Britain. Even though our study shows that the media circulation of scientific papers operates in a traditional way, the intertextual analysis underlines the grand variety of participants (such as journalists, non-scientists, fishermen, technology enthusiasts and Internet users) involved in the diffusion of this information, each of them mobilizing different intertextual strategies, according to their various targets. They all transformed, reformulated and appropriated the scientific information according to their own, unique interests. This study also emphasizes the importance of journalistic websites as opinion relays. They were the first diffusers involved in spreading the information but this role was rarely acknowledged by the Internet users - through citations, for example. In contrast, we observed that amateurs’ communities (communities of practices and communities of interest of fishermen or of buzz fans), which only became involved in a second temporal phase of the spreading, preferred to build up their credibility through citations of the original article. Finally, this research helps to rethink the mechanisms of the circulation of scientific information in the Web-based media, highlighting both the variety and the inventiveness of the interactions between the academic and public spheres.

La recherche est une activité professionnelle qui rencontre aujourd'hui de nombreuses mutations au travers des dispositifs communicationnels et informationnels mobilisés. Si la diffusion des connaissances est l'un des premiers enjeux de l'utilisation de ces dispositifs, il ne faut pas négliger l'analyse de l'utilisation de nouveaux dispositifs communicationnels dans le cadre de l'évaluation mais également de la production des connaissances. Dans cet article, nous nous demanderons comment les chercheurs s'approprient (ou ne s'approprient pas), à la fois d'un point de vue fonctionnel, symbolique et social, un dispositif participatif et public d'évaluation mis en place par une revue scientifique utilisant les outils du Web 2.0. Nous montrerons en particulier quels sont les enjeux politiques mais également épistémologiques induits par l'utilisation d'un tel dispositif d'écriture et de publicisation de la « science en train de se faire ».Lefebvre, M. 2010, « Rendre public le processus d'évaluation de la recherche: Emergence de nouvelles pratiques d'écriture et de lecture de la science. L'exemple d'une revue scientifique du Web 2.0 », Réseaux, 164,

The impact of human activity on our planet is undeniable. However, this matter of fact is not fully understandable without analyzing the narratives through which people make sense of it. In this study, we aim to describe the narratives present in environmental discourses of Mexican and French YouTubers' videos. This corpus is intended to show how environmental issues are framed in the ever-growing discursive arena of entertainment and “influencing” streaming video. We set out to perform a cross-country comparison, with the purpose of contributing to the discussion of whether environmental discourse is country-specific or shared by various nations and, possibly, even global. Our study contributes to the understanding of the social construction of the environment via these discourses. Our main result points to a paradoxical treatment of environmental issues: the YouTubers of our sample represent them as collectively induced problems, but seem to mainly believe that individual-based solutions would resolve them. More broadly, our study suggests a tendency to the individualization and, therefore, the depoliticization of environmental issues as well as a globalization of the environmental discourses in YouTubers' videos.