 Who tweets scientific publications? A large‐scale study of tweeting audiences in all areas of researchLin Zhang, Zhenyu Gou, Zhichao Fang, Gunnar Sivertsen and Ying Huang Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 2023, vol. 74, issue 13, 1485-1497 Abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate the validity of tweets about scientific publications as an indicator of societal impact by measuring the degree to which the publications are tweeted beyond academia. We introduce methods that allow for using a much larger and broader data set than in previous validation studies. It covers all areas of research and includes almost 40 million tweets by 2.5 million unique tweeters mentioning almost 4 million scientific publications. We find that, although half of the tweeters are external to academia, most of the tweets are from within academia, and most of the external tweets are responses to original tweets within academia. Only half of the tweeted publications are tweeted outside of academia. We conclude that, in general, the tweeting of scientific publications is not a valid indicator of the societal impact of research. However, publications that continue being tweeted after a few days represent recent scientific achievements that catch attention in society. These publications occur more often in the health sciences and in the social sciences and humanities. Date: 2023 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jinfst:v:74:y:2023:i:13:p:1485-1497 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article More articles in Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.