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London now shuns journal-based metrics in staff assessment; it relies more on peer judgement of research quality. At Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand, all staff sign the university's code of good governance, agreeing to uphold integrity, impartiality and social responsibility, for example. These are just three of dozens of efforts we found when investigating how institutions worldwide are working to improve research integrity. They form part of our long-term study on this topic, a project that is funded by the European Commission (see Table S2 in Supplementary information for more examples).

This study explores science communication on Twitter by investigating a sample of tweets referring to academic papers in five different scientific fields. The specifications of science communicators on Twitter, the characteristics of those who initiate actions (by tweeting), the extent and quality of reactions (retweeting), individual and group interactions, and the distribution of tweets across types of engagement in the process of science communication (i.e., dissemination, consultation, and evaluation) were explored. A broad array of actors is involved in the communication of science on Twitter, with individual citizens and individual researchers playing an important role. In principle, this is promising for creating direct interaction, which can be difficult through more traditional mass media. The vast majority of communication activities regarding academic papers is undigested dissemination with almost no sign of debate, contestation, or collective reflection. Another general finding of this study is that bot accounts play a major role in the science communication landscape on Twitter.

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