Who posts scientific tweets? An investigation into the productivity, locations, and identities of scientific tweeters

Abstract

Abstract Twitter altmetrics has been proposed to measure the popularity and the potential societal impact of scientific products, but scientific tweeters who produce the Twitter altmetrics data have not been well explored. The study, by analyzing 2.63 million scientific tweeters’ data that are extracted from the Altmetric.com company dataset, is aimed to reveal their productivity and geographic distribution in a comprehensive way. To gain a more in-depth understanding of their account types and identities, 1468 scientific tweeters of different levels of activeness are sampled for further analysis. Our results show that: (1) The extent to which a small proportion of tweeters have posted most of scientific tweets increases over time. In 2016, 10% of scientific tweeters have posted 80% of scientific tweets; (2) Scientific tweeters are widely distributed around the world but in a different pattern with the distribution of general Twitter users. In addition, scientific tweeters are found to be more active in tweeting scientific products than retweeting them in certain areas. (3) Manual coding of the sampled tweeters shows that the percentage of bot accounts among scientific tweeters is 1.8%, which is much lower than that among general Twitter users. Moreover, 73% of scientific tweeters use Twitter for professional purpose, 76% use real names for their accounts, and 16% are institutional accounts. (4) Identities of scientific tweeters are diversified. 49% of them are researchers among which university faculty is the major type, and 38% of them are the general public. With these results we suggest number of scientific tweets is not a good indicator of measuring either popularity or impact, tweeter’s productivity, location and identities must be taken into consideration in interpreting the meaning of Twitter altmetrics.