Understanding the Twitter usage of humanities and social sciences academic journals

Abstract

Scholarly communication has the scope to transcend the limitations of the physical world through social media’s extended coverage and shortened information paths. Accordingly, publishers have created profiles for their jour-nals in Twitter to promote their publications and to initiate discussions with public. This paper investigates the Twitter presence of humanities and social sciences (HSS) journal titles obtained from mainstream citation indi-ces, by analysing the interaction and communication patterns. This study utilizes webometric data collection, descriptive analysis, and social network analysis. Findings indicate that the presence of HSS journals in Twitter across disciplines is not yet substantial. Sharing of general websites appears to be the key activity performed by HSS journals in Twitter. Among them, web content from news portals and magazines are highly disseminated. Sharing of research articles and retweeting was not majorly observed. Inter-journal communication is apparent within the same citation index, but it is very minimal with journals from the other index. However, there seems to be an effort to broaden communication beyond the research community, reaching out to connect with the public.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.