Authors : Renmeng Cao, Xiaoke Xu, Yunxue Cui, Zhizhao Fang, Xianwen Wang
Social media has become an important channel for publicizing academic research, which provides an opportunity for each scientific paper to become a hit.
Employing a dataset of about 10 million tweets of 584,264 scientific papers from 2012 to 2018, this study investigates the differential diffusion of elite and non-elite journal papers (divided by Average journal impact factor percentile).
We find that non-elite journal papers are diffused deeper and farther than elite journal papers, showing a diffusion trend with multiple rounds, sparse, short-duration and small-scale bursts.
In contrast, the bursts of elite journals are characterized by a small number of persistent, dense and large-scale bursts. We also discover that elite journal papers are more inclined to broadcast diffusion while non-elite journal papers prefer viral diffusion.
Elite journal papers are generally disseminated to many loosely connected communities, while non-elite journal papers are diffused to several densely connected communities.