Who, what, why? An exploration of JoVE scientific video publications in tweets

Abstract

This paper investigates how and why scientific video articles are communicated on Twitter. We use video articles published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) as our objects of study. We harvested tweets from October 2011 to November 2015 that contained one or more JoVE links. These tweets “citing” JoVE articles were analyzed both statistically and qualitatively. In this paper, we present the distribution of these tweets, with a closer look at the affordance use of Twitter including hashtags and mentions. In addition, we conducted a content analysis of the sampled Twitter accounts and tweets. We present the coding schemes and results of both Twitter user accounts and tweets text. In addition to the analysis of the coding results, we discuss the content of the tweets with particular attention to issues including the video/visual feature mentioned, the role of Twitter bots, and self-promotion of different stakeholders in the Twitter communication of JoVE video publications.