identifying twitter audiences: who is tweeting about scientific papers?

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Stefanie Haustein and Rodrigo Costas @stefhaustein @RodrigoCostas1 Identifying Twitter audiences Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

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Page 1: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

Stefanie Haustein and Rodrigo Costas@stefhaustein @RodrigoCostas1

Identifying Twitter audiencesWho is tweeting about scientific papers?

Page 2: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

Background

• ~20% of recent journal papers shared on Twitter

• ~10-15% of researchers use Twitter for work

• <3% of researchers’ tweets contain links to papers

• Who tweets scientific papers?

• Altmetric.com classification*:

• Among a random sample of 2,000 accounts tweeting

papers, 34% of individuals identified as having PhD

• Of 286 users linking to SciELO articles, 24% employed at

university, 23% students, 36% not university affiliated

*based on Altmetric.com data 06/2015

(e.g., Haustein, Costas, & Larivière, 2015)

(e.g., Rowlands et al. 2011; van Noorden, 2014)

(Priem & Costello, 2010)

(Tsou, Bowman, Ghazinejad, & Sugimoto, 2010)

(Alperin, 2015)

Page 3: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

Research motivation and objective

• Identifying Twitter user types and engagement related to

scientific papers

• Distinguishing user groups based on:

• Twitter account descriptions

• Number of followers

• Level of engagement with paper

Page 4: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

Methods

• 1.3 million papers published in WoS papers in 2012

• 663,547 original tweets (no RTs) as captured by

Altmetric.com until July 2014 linked to papers via DOI

• Twitter profile information for 115,053 handles via Twitter

API in April 2015

• Reduction to 89,768 users with English account settings

• Account description

• Number of followers = exposure

• Dissimmilarity with paper title = engagement

Page 5: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

exposure

en

ga

ge

men

tinfluencers /

brokers

orators /

discussing

disseminators /

mumblers

broadcasters

Results

Page 6: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

Methods

• Noun phrases extraction with VOSviewer part-of-speech

tagger based on 80,939 account descriptions

• 185,824 unique terms extracted from 78,991 accounts

• Visualization and clustering of co-occurrence network of

325 most frequent terms (≥100)

• Identification of 3 clustersClustering resolution = 0.9, minimum cluster size = 5

• Calculation per term:

Number of Twitter accounts associated with term

Average exposure of accounts associated with term

Average engagement of accounts associated with term

Identification of predominant quadrant of term

Page 7: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

1

2

3

Network of 325 most frequent terms

Node size

number of accounts

associated with term

Node color

cluster affiliation

topics and

collectives

academic

personal

Results

Page 8: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

low high

Node color

average engagement of

accounts associated

with term

Node size

average exposure of

accounts associated

with term

Co-occurrence network of frequent terms

topics and

collectives

academic

personal

1

2

3

Results

Page 9: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

Results

Page 10: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

Users

• High exposure

• Low engagement

Terms

• Science and

research

• Organizational

focus

• News

Results

Page 11: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

Users

• Low exposure

• High engagement

Terms

• Scientists and

students

• Personal

preferences

Results

Page 12: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

Conclusions

• Scientific papers are tweeted by

• Individuals who identify professionally, personally or both

• Organizations or interest groups

• Accounts with organizational descriptions seemed to

have disseminative role

• Accounts with academic or personal terms exhibit higher

engagement

Page 13: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

Limitations and Outlook

• VOSviewer noun phrase extraction

• limited to English language

• not optimized for Twitter account descriptions

• Uncontrolled, uncleaned vocabulary

• Reduction to top terms

• No systematic analysis of terms

Qualitative coding of accounts

Systematic identification of keywords associated with

account types

Testing of four-quadrant hypothesis (engagement↔exposure)

Testing of other user characteristics

Page 14: Identifying Twitter audiences: Who is tweeting about scientific papers?

Stefanie Haustein and Rodrigo Costas@stefhaustein @RodrigoCostas1

Thank you for your attention!

Tuesday, 11/10

1:30pm

Grand D