Who posts scientific tweets? An investigation into the productivity, locations, and identities of scientific tweeters

Houqiang Yu, Tingting Xiao, Shenmeng Xu and Yuefen Wang

Journal of Informetrics, 2019, vol. 13, issue 3, 841-855

Abstract: Twitter altmetrics has been proposed to measure the popularity and the potential societal impact of scientific products, but scientific tweeters who produce the Twitter altmetrics data have not been well explored. The study, by analyzing 2.63 million scientific tweeters’ data that are extracted from the Altmetric.com company dataset, is aimed to reveal their productivity and geographic distribution in a comprehensive way. To gain a more in-depth understanding of their account types and identities, 1468 scientific tweeters of different levels of activeness are sampled for further analysis. Our results show that: (1) The extent to which a small proportion of tweeters have posted most of scientific tweets increases over time. In 2016, 10% of scientific tweeters have posted 80% of scientific tweets; (2) Scientific tweeters are widely distributed around the world but in a different pattern with the distribution of general Twitter users. In addition, scientific tweeters are found to be more active in tweeting scientific products than retweeting them in certain areas. (3) Manual coding of the sampled tweeters shows that the percentage of bot accounts among scientific tweeters is 1.8%, which is much lower than that among general Twitter users. Moreover, 73% of scientific tweeters use Twitter for professional purpose, 76% use real names for their accounts, and 16% are institutional accounts. (4) Identities of scientific tweeters are diversified. 49% of them are researchers among which university faculty is the major type, and 38% of them are the general public. With these results we suggest number of scientific tweets is not a good indicator of measuring either popularity or impact, tweeter’s productivity, location and identities must be taken into consideration in interpreting the meaning of Twitter altmetrics.

Keywords: Altmetrics; Twitter; Scholarly communication; Scientific tweeters; Geographic distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157718303079
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:13:y:2019:i:3:p:841-855

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2019.08.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe

More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().