Étiquette : twitter

Diverse roles of twitter in research evaluation: original tweets and retweets capture different types of engagements with scholarly articles

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 31 mars 2026

Authors : Ashraf Maleki, Kim Holmberg

Altmetrics need to be more critically assessed in terms of the extent to which they reflect impact and quality of research compared to popularity or mere attention. Twitter (now rebranded as X) is a popular platform to, among other things, discuss and share scientific articles.

Earlier altmetric studies have often focused on investigating whether the number of tweets mentioning scientific articles could be used as an indicator of scientific impact or attention, with results showing weak to moderate correlations with citation counts. But all tweets may not be equal, as original tweets and retweets may reflect different levels of engagement and impact. Using a dataset of over 330,000 PLOS publications, this study explores whether these two forms of Twitter activity correlate differently with traditional citation metrics and how these relationships vary across disciplines.

The findings showed the correlation between citations and original tweets was consistently higher than that between citations and retweets and significant weak or moderate, but higher in Social Science and Humanities than in Natural Science, Engineering and Medicine fields. Also, including zero citation counts improved the correlation coefficients for original tweets, but reduced that of retweets.

This indicates that original tweets may be more aligned with citation counts as an indicator of scholarly impact, whereas retweets might reflect broader dissemination and popularity. In conclusion, tweets and retweets are different altmetric indicators and should be considered as two different metrics and analysed separately.

URL : Diverse roles of twitter in research evaluation: original tweets and retweets capture different types of engagements with scholarly articles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvag014

Étiquettes Altmetrics, Ashraf Maleki, Kim Holmberg, PLOS, research impact, Scholarly Publishing, scientific communication, social media, twitter

A role for qualitative methods in researching Twitter data on a popular science article’s communication

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 8 janvier 2025

Authors : Travis Noakes, Corrie Susanna Uys, Patricia Ann Harpur, Izak van Zyl

Big Data communication researchers have highlighted the need for qualitative analysis of online science conversations to better understand their meaning. However, a scholarly gap exists in exploring how qualitative methods can be applied to small data regarding micro-bloggers’ communications about science articles. While social media attention assists with article dissemination, qualitative research into the associated microblogging practices remains limited. To address these gaps, this study explores how qualitative analysis can enhance science communication studies on microblogging articles.

Calls for such qualitative approaches are supported by a practical example: an interdisciplinary team applied mixed methods to better understand the promotion of an unorthodox but popular science article on Twitter over a 2-year period. While Big Data studies typically identify patterns in microbloggers’ activities from large data sets, this study demonstrates the value of integrating qualitative analysis to deepen understanding of these interactions. In this study, a small data set was analyzed using NVivo™ by a pragmatist and MAXQDA™ by a statistician.

The pragmatist’s multimodal content analysis found that health professionals shared links to the article, with its popularity tied to its role as a communication event within a longstanding debate in the health sciences. Dissident professionals used this article to support an emergent paradigm. The analysis also uncovered practices, such as language localization, where a title was translated from English to Spanish to reach broader audiences.

A semantic network analysis confirmed that terms used by the article’s tweeters strongly aligned with its content, and the discussion was notably pro-social. Meta-inferences were then drawn by integrating the findings from the two methods. These flagged the significance of contextualizing the sharing of a health science article in relation to tweeters’ professional identities and their stances on health-related issues. In addition, meta-critiques highlighted challenges in preparing accurate tweet data and analyzing them using qualitative data analysis software. These findings highlight the valuable contributions that qualitative research can make to research involving microblogging data in science communication. Future research could critique this approach or further explore the microblogging of key articles within important scientific debates.

URL : A role for qualitative methods in researching Twitter data on a popular science article’s communication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2024.1431298

Étiquettes Corrie Susanna Uys, Izak van Zyl, Patricia Ann Harpur, Science communication, Travis Noakes, twitter

Who Are Tweeting About Academic Publications? A Cochrane Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Altmetric Studies

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 18 décembre 2023

Authors : Ashraf Maleki, Kim Holmberg

Previous studies have developed different categorizations of Twitter users who interact with scientific publications online, reflecting the difficulty in creating a unified approach. Using Cochrane Review meta-analysis to analyse earlier research (including 79,014 Twitter users, over twenty million tweets, and over five million tweeted publications from 23 studies), we created a consolidated robust categorization consisting of 11 user categories, at different dimensions, covering most of any future needs for user categorizations on Twitter and possibly also other social media platforms.

Our findings showed, with moderate certainty, covering all the earlier different approaches employed, that the predominant Twitter group was individual users (66%), responsible for the majority of tweets (55%) and tweeted publications (50%), while organizations (22%, 27%, and 28%, respectively) and science communicators (16%, 13%, and 30%) clearly contributed smaller proportions.

The cumulative findings from prior investigations indicated a statistically equal extent of academic individuals (33%) and other individuals (28%). While academic individuals shared more academic publications than other individuals (42% vs. 31%), they posted fewer tweets overall (22% vs. 30%), but these differences do not reach statistical significance.

Despite significant heterogeneity arising from variations in categorization methods, the findings consistently indicate the importance of academics in disseminating academic publications.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06399

Étiquettes Altmetrics, Ashraf Maleki, Kim Holmberg, scientific communication, social media, twitter

Interdisciplinary Analysis of Science Communication on Social Media during the COVID-19 Crisis

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 13 février 2023

Authors : Thomas Mandl, Sylvia Jaki, Hannah Mitera, Franziska Schmidt

In times of crisis, science communication needs to be accessible and convincing. In order to understand whether these two criteria apply to concrete science communication formats, it is not enough to merely study the communication product. Instead, the recipient’s perspective also needs to be taken into account.

What do recipients value in popular science communication formats concerning COVID-19? What do they criticize? What elements in the formats do they pay attention to? These questions can be answered by reception studies, for example, by analyzing the reactions and comments of social media users.

This is particularly relevant since scientific information was increasingly disseminated over social media channels during the COVID-19 crisis. This interdisciplinary study, therefore, focuses both on science communication strategies in media formats and the related comments on social media.

First, we selected science communication channels on YouTube and performed a qualitative multi-modal analysis. Second, the comments responding to science communication content online were analyzed by identifying Twitter users who are doctors, researchers, science communicators and those who represent research institutes and then, subsequently, performing topic modeling on the textual data.

The main goal was to find topics that directly related to science communication strategies. The qualitative video analysis revealed, for example, a range of strategies for accessible communication and maintaining transparency about scientific insecurities.

The quantitative Twitter analysis showed that few tweets commented on aspects of the communication strategies. These were mainly positive while the sentiment in the overall collection was less positive.

We downloaded and processed replies for 20 months, starting at the beginning of the pandemic, which resulted in a collection of approximately one million tweets from the German science communication market.

URL : Interdisciplinary Analysis of Science Communication on Social Media during the COVID-19 Crisis

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/knowledge3010008

Étiquettes COVID-19, Franziska Schmidt, Hannah Mitera, Science communication, social media, Sylvia Jaki, Thomas Mandl, twitter

The Twitter accounts of scientific journals: a dataset

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 10 janvier 2023

Author : Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher

Twitter harbours dense networks of academics, but to what extent do scientific journals use that platform? This article introduces a dataset of 3,485 Twitter accounts pertaining to a sample of 13,821 journals listed in Web of Science’s three major indices (SCIE, SSCI and AHCI).

The summary statistics indicate that 25.2% of the journals have a dedicated Twitter presence. This number is likely to grow, as, on average, every one and a half days sees yet another journal setting up a new profile. The share of Twitter presence, however, varies strongly by publisher and discipline.

The most active discipline is political science, which has almost 75% of its journals on Twitter, while other research categories have zero. The median account issues 116 messages a year and it interacts with distinct other users once in two to three Tweets. Approximately 600 journals refer to themselves as ‘peer-reviewed’, while 263 journals refer to their citation-based impact (like the impact factor) in their profile description.

All in all, the data convey immense heterogeneity with respect to the Twitter behaviour of scientific journals. As there are numerous deceptive Twitter profile names established by predatory publishers, it is recommended that journals establish their official accounts lest bogus journals mislead the public about scientific findings. The dataset is available for use for further scientometric analyses.

URL : The Twitter accounts of scientific journals: a dataset

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.593

Étiquettes Altmetrics, Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher, scholarly journals, Science communication, scientific communication, social media, twitter

Are patents linked on Twitter? A case study of Google patents

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 11 octobre 2022

Authors : Enrique Orduña‑Malea, Cristina I. Font‑Julián

This study attempts to analyze patents as cited/mentioned documents to better understand the interest, dissemination and engagement of these documents in social environments, laying the foundations for social media studies of patents (social Patentometrics).

Particularly, this study aims to determine how patents are disseminated on Twitter by analyzing three elements: tweets linking to patents, users linking to patents, and patents linked from Twitter.

To do this, all the tweets containing at least one link to a full-text patent available on Google Patents were collected and analyzed, yielding a total of 126,815 tweets (and 129,001 links) to 86,417 patents. The results evidence an increase of the number of linking tweets over the years, presumably due to the creation of a standardized patent URL ID and the integration of Google Patents and Google Scholar, which took place in 2015.

The engagement achieved by these tweets is limited (80.2% of tweets did not attract likes) but increasing notably since 2018. Two super-publisher twitter bot accounts (dailypatent and uspatentbot) are responsible of 53.3% of all the linking tweets, while most accounts are sporadic users linking to patent as part of a conversation.

The patents most tweeted are, by far, from United States (87.5% of all links to Google Patents), mainly due to the effect of the two super-publishers. The impact of patents in terms of the number of tweets linking to them is unrelated to their year of publication, status or number of patent citations received, while controversial and media topics might be more determinant factors.

However, further research is needed to better understand the topics discussed around patents on Twitter, the users involved, and the metrics attained. Given the increasing number of linking users and linked patents, this study finds Twitter as a relevant source to measure patent-level metrics, shedding light on the impact and interest of patents by the broad public.

URL : Are patents linked on Twitter? A case study of Google patents

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04519-y

Étiquettes Altmetrics, Cristina I. Font‑Julián, Enrique Orduña‑Malea, Google Patents, patentometrics, patents, scientific communication, social media, twitter