It’s All About Information? The Following Behaviour of Professors and PhD Students in Computer Science on Twitter

Abstract

Article available under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/) eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Reuse Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version -refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher's website. TakedownIf you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. ABSTRACTIn this paper we investigate the role of the academic status in the following behaviour of computer scientists on Twitter. Based on a uses and gratifications perspective, we focus on the activity of a Twitter account and the reciprocity of following relationships. We propose that the account activity addresses the users' information motive only, whereas the user's academic status relates to both the information motive and community development (as in peer networking or career planning).Variables were extracted from Twitter user data. We applied a biographical approach to correctly identify the academic status (professor versus PhD student). We calculated a 2 × 2 MANOVA on the influence of the activity of the account and the academic status (on different groups of followers) to differentiate the influence of the information motive versus the motive for community development.Results suggest that for computer scientists Twitter is mainly an information network. However, we found significant effects in the sense of career planning, that is, the accounts of professors had even in the case of low activity a relatively high number of researcher followers -both PhD followers as well as professor followers. Additionally, there was also some weak evidence for community development gratifications in the sense of peer-networking of professors.Overall, we conclude that the academic use of Twitter is not only about information, but also about career planning and networking.

Students and Lecturers on Facebook: Gender-Related Differences in the View of the Academic Hierarchy

“…The study of Kennedy, Wellman, and Klement [21] suggested that women are more inclined to online networking and that the female internet use can be characterized in accordance with the traditional role of females as "caregiver", i.e., more cooperative and more directed to social interaction. Similarly, also for the academic use of Twitter there is first evidence for gender-related differences [22].…”

To Follow or to Unfollow: Motives for the Academic Use of Twitter

“…Similarly, the perceived informativeness of a Twitter account has been shown to reduce the likelihood of unfollowing [14]. Recent research has developed more detailed conceptualizations of motives for the professional and academic usage of social media [15] [16]. For example, based on an online survey among members of three professional social science organizations, Gruzd and Goertzen [16] identified distinct motives for social media usage such as "keeping up to date with topics", "following other researchers' work" and "discovering new ideas or publications".…”

“…She found that perceived benefits included connecting and establishing networks with other academics as well as non-academic audiences, promoting openness and sharing of information, publicizing and development of research, and giving and receiving support. Another study by Linek and colleagues [15] showed that (strategic) politeness can also be part of work-related community development and academic networking on Twitter.…”

Women Prefer Reciprocity: Gender-Related Differences in Academic Networking on Twitter

“…The microblogging service Twitter supports a number of uses in an academic context, such as information seeking, relationship management, and signaling affinity to particular issues and people [14]. Prior research [15] has shown that Twitter usage among computer scientists is predominantly motivated by information seeking, with community development playing an important role as well. With respect to reciprocal relationships, it should be noted that following a Twitter account provides other gratifications than following back.…”

“…For this study we use a dataset of Twitter accounts of computer scientists [22] dataset available on: http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12942). The dataset has previously been used for a study of academic Twitter use motives among computer scientists [15] and provided evidence that for this audience, Twitter is primarily an information network, but also delivers community development gratifications. In this study, we used the dataset to investigate gender differences in the social networking behavior of computer scientists (professors and PhD students).…”