Abstract

We analyze the online response to the preprint publication of a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and May 2011. We study three forms of responses to these preprints: downloads on the arXiv.org site, mentions on the social media site Twitter, and early citations in the scholarly record. We perform two analyses. First, we analyze the delay and time span of article downloads and Twitter mentions following submission, to understand the temporal configuration of these reactions and whether one precedes or follows the other. Second, we run regression and correlation tests to investigate the relationship between Twitter mentions, arXiv downloads, and article citations. We find that Twitter mentions and arXiv downloads of scholarly articles follow two distinct temporal patterns of activity, with Twitter mentions having shorter delays and narrower time spans than arXiv downloads. We also find that the volume of Twitter mentions is statistically correlated with arXiv downloads and early citations just months after the publication of a preprint, with a possible bias that favors highly mentioned articles.

Highlights

  • The view from the ‘‘ivory tower’’ is that scholars make rational, expert decisions on what to publish, what to read and what to cite

  • We keep all 5,752 tweets and 4,415 articles mentioned on Twitter, since we want to show a full picture of our data

  • In order to better understand how Twitter mentions vary across domain, we show the Complementary Cumulative Distribution Functions (CCDF) of Twitter mentions for all articles in the five most frequently observed subjects domains of Figure 5

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Summary

Introduction

The view from the ‘‘ivory tower’’ is that scholars make rational, expert decisions on what to publish, what to read and what to cite. For each article in this cohort, we gathered information about their downloads from the arXiv server weekly download logs, their daily number of mentions on Twitter using a large-scale collection of Twitter data collected over that period, and their early citations in the scholarly record from Google Scholar.

Results
Conclusion
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