User engagement with scholarly tweets of scientific papers: a large-scale and cross-disciplinary analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the extent to which scholarly tweets of scientific papers are engaged with by Twitter users through four types of user engagement behaviors, i.e., liking, retweeting, quoting, and replying. Based on a sample consisting of 7 million scholarly tweets of Web of Science papers, our results show that likes is the most prevalent engagement metric, covering 44% of scholarly tweets, followed by retweets (36%), whereas quotes and replies are only present for 9% and 7% of all scholarly tweets, respectively. From a disciplinary point of view, scholarly tweets in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities are more likely to trigger user engagement over other subject fields. The presence of user engagement is more associated with other Twitter-based factors (e.g., number of mentioned users in tweets and number of followers of users) than with science-based factors (e.g., citations and Mendeley readers of tweeted papers). Building on these findings, this study sheds light on the possibility to apply user engagement metrics in measuring deeper levels of Twitter reception of scholarly information.

Are patents linked on Twitter? A case study of Google patents

“…If we take into account the total number of interactions received, likes (195,061) and retweets (67,941) are the most numerous metrics, while the number of replies (26,364) and quotes (8,360) are less used. These results are aligned with the engagement behavior found for scholarly tweets by Fang et al ( 2022 ).…”

“…73.3% of all linking tweets (92,968) have obtained no engagement at all (zero likes, retweets, replies and quotes), while only the 1.6% (1,637) have obtained at least one interaction in each of the engagement metrics measured. This result is aligned with the user engagement found for 7,037,233 unique original scholarly tweets (Fang et al, 2022 ), where only the 2% of the tweets attained engagement in all the four types of user engagement.…”

“…As regards the interaction rate, patents show low values: 1.54 likes per tweet and 0.54 retweets per tweet. These results are lower than those found by Fang et al ( 2022 ) for research publications (2.95 likes per tweet and 1.91 retweets per tweet, respectively). While these results might evidence that patents are less engaged than scientific publications on Twitter, further research is deemed necessary to confirm this issue, as Fang et al ( 2022 ) only managed publications indexed in Web of Science, and our contribution only analyzed patent IDs belonging to Google Patents.…”

“…These results are lower than those found by Fang et al ( 2022 ) for research publications (2.95 likes per tweet and 1.91 retweets per tweet, respectively). While these results might evidence that patents are less engaged than scientific publications on Twitter, further research is deemed necessary to confirm this issue, as Fang et al ( 2022 ) only managed publications indexed in Web of Science, and our contribution only analyzed patent IDs belonging to Google Patents. In any case, direct comparisons between patents and research publications should be discussed cautiously, as their communities of attention can overlap to some extent, but they are not necessarily the same.…”

From academic to media capital: To what extent does the scientific reputation of universities translate into Wikipedia attention?

“…These findings have triggered a new wave of research that view altmetrics from a science-society lens rather than as direct measures of impact and recognition (Costas et al, 2020;Díaz-Faes et al, 2019;Wouters et al, 2019). This shift is enabling novel methodological approaches to capture and characterize social media activity from more interactive perspectives (Arroyo-Machado et al, 2021;Fang et al, 2022). In these approaches, the focus extends beyond research objects-i.e., papers and research products-to include news media and other means-e.g., blogs, websites-that allow societal actors to share and discuss research, its epistemic features-e.g., research topics, disciplines, schools of thought-and types of engagement with research objects-e.g., access, appraisal, and application (Alperin et al, 2023;Costas et al, 2020;Haustein et al, 2016).…”