Investigating the quality of interactions and public engagement around scientific papers on Twitter

Abstract

This study explores science communication on Twitter by investigating a sample of tweets referring to academic papers in five different scientific fields. The specifications of science communicators on Twitter, the characteristics of those who initiate actions (by tweeting), the extent and quality of reactions (retweeting), individual and group interactions, and the distribution of tweets across types of engagement in the process of science communication (i.e., dissemination, consultation, and evaluation) were explored. A broad array of actors is involved in the communication of science on Twitter, with individual citizens and individual researchers playing an important role. In principle, this is promising for creating direct interaction, which can be difficult through more traditional mass media. The vast majority of communication activities regarding academic papers is undigested dissemination with almost no sign of debate, contestation, or collective reflection. Another general finding of this study is that bot accounts play a major role in the science communication landscape on Twitter.

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, ).…”

“…Recently, a content analysis of Twitter users who disseminated academic articles reported that the types of users differed across different disciplines. 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 ., ).…”

“…Altmetric.com's classifications of Twitter users are unreliable, however, because they apply 'Member of the public' to profiles that cannot be fitted into other categories (i.e. 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).…”

“…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, ). Previous studies have found that about half of the users who disseminate academic information on Twitter are non‐academics (Mohammadi, Thelwall, Kwasny, & Holmes, ; see also: Didegah, Mejlgaard, & Sørensen, ; Tsou, Bowman, Ghazinejad, & Sugimoto, ) and that users who bookmark journal articles in the social reference sharing website Mendeley tend to be junior researchers (Mohammadi, Thelwall, & Kousha, ).…”

Stepping Out of the Ivory Tower for Ocean Literacy

“…In response to the increase in SNS popularity, individual scientists, research centers, and academic institutions are now frequently turning to Twitter to publicize scientific events and journal publications (Eysenbach, 2011;Peoples et al, 2016), and to communicate with their peers about science and research (López-Goñi and Sánchez-Angulo, 2017;Didegah et al, 2018). Twitter is also perceived by many scientists and research centers as a platform that can support science communication efforts with non-scientific audiences (López-Goñi and Sánchez-Angulo, 2017; Côté and Darling, 2018b;Didegah et al, 2018). As a result, scientists from diverse disciplines have analyzed Twitter to better understand how users interact and exchange information (Kwak et al, 2010;Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan, 2013;Didegah et al, 2018).…”