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A systematic identification and analysis of scientists on Twitter
Qing Ke1, Yong-Yeol Ahn1, Cassidy R Sugimoto1
1School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America.
Plos One
|April 12, 2017
Summary
Altmetrics from social media may mislead. This study identifies scientists on Twitter, revealing their demographics and network behaviors, offering a clearer view of scholarly social media engagement.
Area of Science:
- Scholarly communication
- Social media analysis
- Bibliometrics
Background:
- Altmetrics are increasingly used to gauge the societal impact of research.
- Current altmetric data may be misleading due to unknown user demographics.
- Understanding who discusses science online is crucial for accurate impact assessment.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a systematic method for identifying and analyzing scientists on Twitter.
- To investigate the characteristics and behaviors of scientists active on social media.
- To provide foundational data for constructing reliable social media-based scholarly metrics.
Main Methods:
- Developed a novel approach to identify scientists on Twitter without external bibliographic data.
- Analyzed demographics, sharing patterns, and network structures of identified scientists.
- Examined URL sharing behavior to understand the nature of science-related content.
Main Results:
- Twitter engages scholars across disciplines, with over/under-representation in certain fields (e.g., social sciences, physical sciences).
- Women are better represented on Twitter than in scholarly publishing.
- Scientists exhibit assortative mixing by discipline, indicating persistent disciplinary silos online.
- A small fraction of shared URLs are science-related, despite a scholarly imprint.
Conclusions:
- The developed method effectively identifies scientists and stakeholder groups on social media.
- Scientist demographics and behaviors on Twitter differ from traditional scholarly metrics.
- Findings highlight the need for careful interpretation of altmetrics and provide a basis for improved social media indicators.