Astrophysicists on Twitter

Stefanie Haustein · Timothy D. Bowman · Kim Holmberg · Isabella Peters · Vincent Larivière

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scientometrics and bibliometrics research Academic Publishing and Open Access Web visibility and informetrics

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the tweeting behavior of 37 astrophysicists on Twitter and compares their tweeting behavior with their publication behavior and citation impact to show whether they tweet research-related topics or not. Design/methodology/approach – Astrophysicists on Twitter are selected to compare their tweets with their publications from Web of Science. Different user groups are identified based on tweeting and publication frequency. Findings – A moderate negative correlation (ρ=−0.339) is found between the number of publications and tweets per day, while retweet and citation rates do not correlate. The similarity between tweets and abstracts is very low (cos=0.081). User groups show different tweeting behavior such as retweeting and including hashtags, usernames and URLs. Research limitations/implications – The study is limited in terms of the small set of astrophysicists. Results are not necessarily representative of the entire astrophysicist community on Twitter and they most certainly do not apply to scientists in general. Future research should apply the methods to a larger set of researchers and other scientific disciplines. Practical implications – To a certain extent, this study helps to understand how researchers use Twitter. The results hint at the fact that impact on Twitter can neither be equated with nor replace traditional research impact metrics. However, tweets and other so-called altmetrics might be able to reflect other impact of scientists such as public outreach and science communication. Originality/value – To the best of the knowledge, this is the first in-depth study comparing researchers’ tweeting activity and behavior with scientific publication output in terms of quantity, content and impact.

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References

2011Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact 2013Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services 2013Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature 2011Social media use in the research workflow 2012How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted Preprints: Article Downloads, Twitter Mentions, and Citations 2014Disciplinary differences in Twitter scholarly communication 2008Automatic Term Identification for Bibliometric Mapping 2010Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages

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