Environ. Res. Lett. 12 (2017) 084019 ExxonMobil has responded stating, ‘We unequivocally reject allegations that ExxonMobil suppressed climate change research contained in media reports that are inaccurate distortions of ExxonMobil’s nearly 40 year history of climate research. We understand that climate risks are real. The company has continuously, publicly and openly researched and discussed the risks of climate change, carbon life cycle analysis and emissions reductions’ [11]. In particular, ExxonMobil’s website and statements offer a ‘10 page document listing the over 50 peer-reviewed articles on climate research and related policy analysis from ExxonMobil scientists from 1983 to the present’ [11–15]. ExxonMobil argues that this list, entitled ‘Exxon Mobil Contributed Publications’, ‘undercuts the allegation . . . that ExxonMobil sought to hide our research.’ The company has also published some of its internal company documents, originally made public by journalists at InsideClimate News (ICN) [16, 17] (and simultaneously reported by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Los Angeles Times [18]), to demonstrate that ‘allegations are based on deliberately cherry-picked statements’ [14]. ‘Read all of these documents and make up your own mind,’ ExxonMobil has challenged [14]. This paper takes up that challenge by analyzing the materials highlighted by the company, and comparing them with other publicly available ExxonMobil communications on AGW. The issue at stake is whether the corporation misled consumers, shareholders and/or the general public by making public statements that cast doubt on climate science and its implications, and which were at odds with available scientific information and with what the company knew. We stress that the question is not whether ExxonMobil ‘suppressed climate change research,’ but rather how they communicated about it [11]. Our analysis covers the publication period of the documents made available by ExxonMobil: 1977– 2014. These documents include peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications (academic papers, conference proceedings, reports, company pamphlets, etc) and internal documents. Our analysis compares these documents with ExxonMobil’s public outreach in the form of paid, editorial-style advertisements— known as ‘advertorials’—published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times (NYT) [19]. We focus on advertorials because they come directly from ExxonMobil and are an unequivocally public form of communication ‘designed to affect public opinion or official opinion’ [20]. Kollman has found that advertorializing is second only to mobilizing group members as the most commonly used outside lobbying technique [20, 21]. We examine whether these communications sent consistent messages about the state of climate science and its implications, or whether there is a discernable discrepancy between the company’s public and private communications. 2 Our study offers the first empirical assessment and intercomparison of ExxonMobil’s private and public statements on AGW2. By bringing to bear the quantitative methodologies of consensus measurement [22, 23] and content analysis [24–28], our results add to (i) earlier analyses of ExxonMobil’s communication practices [19, 20, 29–36], (ii) qualitative accounts of the company’s AGW communications [17, 18, 37–39], and (iii) the application of consensus measurement/content analysis to AGW communications [26–28, 40, 41]. In addition, this study contributes to the broader literature on climate change denial [42–48], corporate issue management [21, 35, 49, 50] and misinformation strategies [51–55], and the social construction of ignorance [56–58]. 2. Method We adapt and combine the methodologies used to quantify the consensus on AGW by Oreskes [23] and Cook et al [22] with the content analysis methodologies used to characterize media communications of AGW by Feldman et al and Elsasser and Dunlap [27, 28]. Developed to assess peer-reviewed scientific literature, cable news, and conservative newspapers, respectively, these offer generalizable approaches to quantifying the positions of an entity or community on a particular scientific question across multiple document classes. Our study comprises 187 documents (see table 1): 32 internal documents (from ICN [16], ExxonMobil [59], and Climate Investigations Center [60]); 53 articles labeled ‘Peer-Reviewed Publications’ in ExxonMobil’s ‘Contributed Publications’ list [15]; 48 (unique and retrievable) documents labeled ‘Additional Publications’ in ExxonMobil’s ‘Contributed Publications’ list; 36 Mobil/ExxonMobil advertorials related to climate change in the NYT; and 18 ‘Other’ publicly available ExxonMobil communications–mostly non-peer-reviewed materials–obtained during our research. To our knowledge, these constitute the relevant, publicly available internal documents that have led to recent allegations against ExxonMobil, as well as all peer-reviewed and nonpeer-reviewed documents offered by the company in response. They also include all discovered ExxonMobil advertorials in the NYT discussing AGW. Advertorials are sourced from a collection compiled by PolluterWatch based on a search of the ProQuest archive [61]. 2 There are, of course, countless additional climate change communications from ExxonMobil that could be included in future work, including archived internal documents, advertorials published in newspapers beyond the NYT, and non-peer-reviewed materials such as speech transcripts, television adverts, patent documents, shareholder reports, and third-party communications (for example, from lobbyists, think-tanks, and politicians funded by ExxonMobil). These documents are potentially important, but are not the focus of the present study.