Abstract:
Mangroves are one of the important ecosystems found in many tropical and subtropical areas. The
importance of mangrove ecosystems in Sri Lanka has highlighted in numerous scientific studies and
the findings of these studies are disseminated through various publications indexed in popular scholar
databases. Moreover, with the advancement of new technologies, knowledge of mangrove is also
disseminated on popular social media platforms. Quantification of this information is important in
determining the status of knowledge on mangrove and related science communication. In this
backdrop, the present study focused on determining the status of knowledge on mangroves using the
popular social media platform; Twitter™ and scholarly database; SCOPUS®. In social media
analysis, 475 twitter messages/tweets related to the keyword „Mangrove‟ was extracted from the
Twitter™ database. R programing language and various other packages (TwitteR, tm, word cloud
etc.) were used in analyzing the textual data. Topic modelling was employed to identify the latent
topics in mangrove related tweets. Scientometric analysis of mangrove related studies in Sri Lanka
was carried out using the Scopus® database. Results of the Twitter™ analysis showed the existence
of various subthemes in mangrove research (e.g. conservation and mangrove rehabilitation etc). Word
cloud analysis has indicated that forests, restoration, blue carbon, coastal and communities were
dominant keywords. Results of the scientometric analyses of Sri Lankan mangrove studies indicated
an increment in mangrove related publications (p = 0.001, R2= 0.85). The relationship between
annual Gross Domestic Production (GDP) and the number of publications was positive (p = 0.001, R2
= 0.83). In contrast to that, a few Sri Lankan authors and institutes/universities dominated in
mangrove related publications (n=105). Keyword analysis of mangrove related publications indicated
that studies on family Rhizophoraceae (n=38) were prevalent in the scientific literature. Findings of
the present study indicated that expanding the mangrove related research to other institutions and
facilitating research infrastructure is essential. Furthermore, scientific dissemination of these research
findings in social media platforms is highly encouraged.
Keywords: Twitter™; Scopus®; Mangroves; Data mining; Topic modelling; R Programming
