Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/86187
Title: Who are Tweeting Research Articles and Why?
Authors: Htoo, Tint Hla Hla
Na, Jin-Cheon
Keywords: Twitter
Altmetrics
User Profiling
Motivation
Psychology
Issue Date: 2017
Source: Htoo, T. H. H. & Na, J.-C. (2017). Who are tweeting research articles and why?. Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice, 5(3), 48-60.
Series/Report no.: Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to understand the profiles of users and their motivations in sharing research articles on Twitter. The goal is to contribute to the understanding of Twitter as a new altmetric measure for assessing impact of research articles. In this paper, we extended the previous study of tweet motivations by finding out the profiles of twitter users. In particular, we examined six characteristics of users: gender, geographic distribution, academic, non-academic, individual, and organization. Out of several, we would like to highlight here three key findings. First, a great majority of users (86%) were from North America and Europe indicating the possibility that, if in general, tweets for research articles are mainly in English, Twitter as an alternative metric has a Western bias. Second, several previous altmetrics studies suggested that tweets, and altmetrics in general, do not indicate scholarly impact due to their low correlation with citation counts. This study provides further details in this aspect by revealing that most tweets (77%) were by individual users, 67% of whom were nonacademic. Therefore, tweets mostly reflect impact of research articles on the general public, rather than on academia. Finally, analysis from profiles and motivations showed that the majority of tweets (from 42% to 57%) in all user types highlighted the summary or findings of the article indicating that tweets are a new way of communicating research findings.
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/86187
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/43940
ISSN: 2287-9099
DOI: 10.1633/JISTaP.2017.5.3.4
Schools: Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information 
Departments: Library 
Rights: © 2017 Tint Hla Hla Htoo, Na Jin-Cheon. All JISTaP content is Open Access, meaning it is accessible online to everyone, without fee and authors’ permission. All JISTaP content is published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:/ creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Under this license, authors reserve the copyright for their content; however, they permit anyone to unrestrictedly use, distribute, and reproduce the content in any medium as far as the original authors and source are cited. For any reuse, redistribution, or reproduction of a work, users must clarify the license terms under which the work was produced.
Fulltext Permission: open
Fulltext Availability: With Fulltext
Appears in Collections:LIB Journal Articles
WKWSCI Journal Articles

Files in This Item:
File Description SizeFormat 
JISTaP_published_version.pdf197.11 kBAdobe PDFThumbnail
View/Open

SCOPUSTM   
Citations 50

6
Updated on Mar 21, 2024

Page view(s) 5

936
Updated on Mar 27, 2024

Download(s) 20

202
Updated on Mar 27, 2024

Google ScholarTM

Check

Altmetric


Plumx

Items in DR-NTU are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.