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Научная составляющая текстов по психологии, публикующихся в социальной сети "ВКонтакте"
The past few years have witnessed an increase of, on one hand, interest in popularized scientific knowledge, on the other hand, the number of people who believe in homeopathy and are wary of genetically modified products. It indicates a need for popularizing scientific knowledge including information about scientific psychology and scientifically developed practical methods which must be conveyed to the public at large, to those who take great interest in psychology, but look for information in the mass media rather than at school or university. In the last decade the social networks have become an everyday source of information for many people, especially young, and the quality of information about psychology being spread through the networks is of considerable interest to psychologists. The study described aimed to assess academic quality of psychological texts in theme communities, popular with users of the social network “Vkontakte”. Expert assessment (by young academic psychologists working at research institutes and universities of Moscow and St. Petersburg) helped to identify communities broadcasting academically correct (scientifically proved) and incorrect (not proved scientifically) information about psychology in the network. Texts (news, posts) from the two types of communities were identified with the help of the crawler, a system of collecting data from social networks, and prevalent subjects and terminology were identified with the help of computerized linguistic analysis. The terms “synapse”, “learning”, “axon”, “mediator” could serve as indicators of the academic nature of the texts, while “money”, “happiness”, “introvert” are indicators of the opposite. The authors intend to use the data obtained for developing recommendations for subscribers and network administrators interested in spreading scientific information about psychology.