Scholarly book publishers as publicity agents for SSH titles on Twitter

Yajie Wang () and Alesia Zuccala ()
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Yajie Wang: Dalian University of Technology
Alesia Zuccala: University of Copenhagen

Scientometrics, 2021, vol. 126, issue 6, No 14, 4817-4840

Abstract: Abstract The purpose of this paper was to examine the presence of scholarly book publishers on Twitter, and tweets about books in 10 SSH disciplines (2014–2018). This included time of tweet relative to the book's publication date and time span of twitter activity. We also investigated the ‘categories of conversation' in publisher tweets, with a focus on hashtags and @-mentions. Data collection involved matching 15,454 unique book titles from the BKCI-Web of Science with tweets retrieved from Altmetrics.com, using ISBNs. This led to a working dataset of n = 6258 books (41%), which had received at least one tweet. Our analyses show that scholarly publishers have been using Twitter more and more over a 5 year period, especially commerical publishers. Commercial publishers are more likely than university presses to have multiple Twitter accounts. Both, though mainly commercial publishers, are active at targeting the Twitter accounts of book authors, book editors, other individuals and universities/institutions/organisations. Whilst re-tweets do not often follow first, or ‘initiator' tweets made by publishers, publisher engagement in general corresponds significantly with other tweets, and contributes to keeping the book active for a longer period on Twitter. Publishers play a key role as promotional agents, particularly when a scholarly title is part of a special offer, relevant to a conference, event or special calendar date, when an author is a prize winner, or if author-agreements have been made in regards to open access book chapters.

Keywords: Scholarly book publishing; Social sciences and humanities; Twitter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-021-03947-6

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