A systematic identification and analysis of scientists on Twitter

Abstract

Metrics derived from Twitter and other social media—often referred to as altmetrics—are increasingly used to estimate the broader social impacts of scholarship. Such efforts, however, may produce highly misleading results, as the entities that participate in conversations about science on these platforms are largely unknown. For instance, if altmetric activities are generated mainly by scientists, does it really capture broader social impacts of science? Here we present a systematic approach to identifying and analyzing scientists on Twitter. Our method can identify scientists across many disciplines, without relying on external bibliographic data, and be easily adapted to identify other stakeholder groups in science. We investigate the demographics, sharing behaviors, and interconnectivity of the identified scientists. We find that Twitter has been employed by scholars across the disciplinary spectrum, with an over-representation of social and computer and information scientists; under-representation of mathematical, physical, and life scientists; and a better representation of women compared to scholarly publishing. Analysis of the sharing of URLs reveals a distinct imprint of scholarly sites, yet only a small fraction of shared URLs are science-related. We find an assortative mixing with respect to disciplines in the networks between scientists, suggesting the maintenance of disciplinary walls in social media. Our work contributes to the literature both methodologically and conceptually—we provide new methods for disambiguating and identifying particular actors on social media and describing the behaviors of scientists, thus providing foundational information for the construction and use of indicators on the basis of social media metrics.

A Pilot Qualitative Case Study of Agricultural and Natural Resources Scientists’ Twitter Usage for Engaging Public Audiences

“…Bill Nye, often referred to as 'The Science Guy' from his past public television show, has 5.8 million followers (@BillNye, 2019). Ke, Ahn, and Sugimoto (2017) examined Twitter lists and memberships using a snowballing technique to find users with identifying information fitting the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic's definition of scientist occupations, as well as Wikipedia lists of scientist careers. The researchers found 45,867 scientists using Twitter, with mathematical and physical scientists underrepresented and social scientists overrepresented on the platform (Ke, Ahn, & Sugimoto, 2017).…”

“…Ke, Ahn, and Sugimoto (2017) examined Twitter lists and memberships using a snowballing technique to find users with identifying information fitting the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic's definition of scientist occupations, as well as Wikipedia lists of scientist careers. The researchers found 45,867 scientists using Twitter, with mathematical and physical scientists underrepresented and social scientists overrepresented on the platform (Ke, Ahn, & Sugimoto, 2017). They also found that more male than female scientists used the platform (Ke, Ahn, & Sugimoto, 2017).…”

“…The researchers found 45,867 scientists using Twitter, with mathematical and physical scientists underrepresented and social scientists overrepresented on the platform (Ke, Ahn, & Sugimoto, 2017). They also found that more male than female scientists used the platform (Ke, Ahn, & Sugimoto, 2017).…”

“…The Diffusion of Innovations theory (Rogers, 2003) guided the examination of participants' various stages of Twitter adoption and usage. Twitter was selected as the technology to study due to prior research that has shown several scientists are indeed using the social media platform (Ke, Ahn, & Sugimoto, 2017;Côté and Darling, 2018). Additionally, the conceptual framework of 'Preaching to the Choir vs. Singing from the Rooftops' (Côté and Darling, 2018) provided an important lens for this study.…”

“…While scientists are encouraged to establish an online presence, McClain (2017) pointed out that research funders may not see the impacts of or value scientists' posting content via individual online channels. However, as social media analytics become more refined, there does appear to be a sizeable contingency of scientists utilizing the specific social media platform of Twitter to establish online identities to have their voices heard (Côté and Darling, 2018;Ke, Ahn, and Sugimoto, 2017).…”