Academic information on Twitter: A user survey

Abstract

Although counts of tweets citing academic papers are used as an informal indicator of interest, little is known about who tweets academic papers and who uses Twitter to find scholarly information. Without knowing this, it is difficult to draw useful conclusions from a publication being frequently tweeted. This study surveyed 1,912 users that have tweeted journal articles to ask about their scholarly-related Twitter uses. Almost half of the respondents (45%) did not work in academia, despite the sample probably being biased towards academics. Twitter was used most by people with a social science or humanities background. People tend to leverage social ties on Twitter to find information rather than searching for relevant tweets. Twitter is used in academia to acquire and share real-time information and to develop connections with others. Motivations for using Twitter vary by discipline, occupation, and employment sector, but not much by gender. These factors also influence the sharing of different types of academic information. This study provides evidence that Twitter plays a significant role in the discovery of scholarly information and cross-disciplinary knowledge spreading. Most importantly, the large numbers of non-academic users support the claims of those using tweet counts as evidence for the non-academic impacts of scholarly research.

Who shares health and medical scholarly articles on Facebook?

“…This provides evidence that Facebook is a platform that people outside academia use to publicly disseminate scientific publications to the public and professional networks. These findings support claims from previous studies that social web sites such as Facebook and Twitter can facilitate knowledge flows from academia to a broader audience (Didegah et al ., ; Mohammadi et al ., ; Na & Ye, ).…”

“…In particular, 62% and 43% were individual public accounts for Physical & Engineering and Social & Humanities journal articles, respectively, while 48% and 37% of users who tweeted Math & Computer and Social & Humanities, respectively, were scholars (Didegah et al ., ). A survey of users who tweeted scholarly information confirmed that just over half (55%) were in academia (Mohammadi et al ., ).…”

“…researcher, practitioner, science communicator) (Altmeric LLP, 2017 (Didegah et al, 2018). A survey of users who tweeted scholarly information confirmed that just over half (55%) were in academia (Mohammadi et al, 2018). The only relevant Facebook study found that members who posted psychology journal articles on Facebook reported that they were mainly not academic users (Na & Ye, 2017).…”

“…This shows that such social media mentions might provide some indication of scholarly or social impact, but to interpret the meaning of the counts, it is important to know who creates social web citations (Sud & Thelwall, 2014). Previous studies have found that about half of the users who disseminate academic information on Twitter are non-academics (Mohammadi, Thelwall, Kwasny, & Holmes, 2018; see also : Didegah, Mejlgaard, & Sørensen, 2018;Tsou, Bowman, Ghazinejad, & Sugimoto, 2015) and that users who bookmark journal articles in the social reference sharing website Mendeley tend to be junior researchers (Mohammadi, Thelwall, & Kousha, 2016).…”

Do articles in open access journals have more frequent altmetric activity than articles in subscription-based journals? An investigation of the research output of Finnish universities

“…Open Access (OA) is a term used to refer to the unrestricted access to scientific articles online, or as Suber's (2012, p. 4) often referenced definition for OA states: "Open Access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." OA is generally divided into Gold OA and Green OA, with the former referring to on the platform a significant proportion of it may be (Tsou et al 2015;Mohammadi et al 2018;Vainio and Holmberg 2017). Altmetrics are considered to function as complements (rather than alternatives) to more traditional citation-based indicators of research impact (Haustein et al 2015).…”