A new study tries to sharpen our understanding of the highly verbal parasites known as trolls. Trolls – call them internet trolls, if you like – are in some ways quite similar to Plasmodium falciparum, a protozoan parasite that causes malaria in large numbers of human beings. Both kinds of parasite are maddeningly difficult to suppress. They manage, again and again, to return after we thought we'd seen the last of them. Each can, if left untreated, cause agony or worse.

These trolls infect any place where people gather electronically to converse by writing comments to each other. Trolls creep into and crop up anywhere they can, wheedling for attention in chat rooms, Twitter streams, blogs, and, as you may have noticed, in the comments section of online news articles.

One of the many annoying things about internet trolls is that it's difficult to define, with academic rigour, what they do. Claire Hardaker, a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire and a PhD student at Lancaster University, took up the challenge. Her study, Trolling in Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication, is published somewhat counter-intuitively in the Journal of Politeness Research.

Hardaker presented an early form of the paper to a mostly troll-free audience at the Linguistic Impoliteness and Rudeness conference held at her university in 2009.

After much research and hard work, Hardaker came up with a working definition. A troll is someone "who constructs the identity of sincerely wishing to be part of the group in question, including professing or conveying pseudo-sincere intentions, but whose real intention(s) is/are to cause disruption and/or to trigger or exacerbate conflict for the purposes of their own amusement".

She arrived at this after much trawling through data. Lots of data. A "172-million-word corpus of unmoderated, asynchronous computer-mediated communication", a nine-year collection of commentary in an online discussion group about horse riding. She focused in on the huge number of passages where people mentioned trolls, trolling, trolled, trollish, trolldom, and other variations on the key word "troll".

Distilling the wisdom, Hardaker set up this handy guide to interacting with trolls:

"Trolling can (1) be frustrated if users correctly interpret an intent to troll, but are not provoked into responding, (2) be thwarted if users correctly interpret an intent to troll, but counter in such a way as to curtail or neutralise the success of the troller, (3) fail if users do not correctly interpret an intent to troll and are not provoked by the troller, or, (4) succeed if users are deceived into believing the troller's pseudo-intention(s), and are provoked into responding sincerely. Finally, users can mock troll. That is, they may undertake what appears to be trolling with the aim of enhancing or increasing effect, or group cohesion.

Any comments?

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

• This article was amended on 14 June to correct the name of the researcher's institutions.