The unbearable emptiness of tweeting—About journal articles

Abstract

Enthusiasm for using Twitter as a source of data in the social sciences extends to measuring the impact of research with Twitter data being a key component in the new altmetrics approach. In this paper, we examine tweets containing links to research articles in the field of dentistry to assess the extent to which tweeting about scientific papers signifies engagement with, attention to, or consumption of scientific literature. The main goal is to better comprehend the role Twitter plays in scholarly communication and the potential value of tweet counts as traces of broader engagement with scientific literature. In particular, the pattern of tweeting to the top ten most tweeted scientific dental articles and of tweeting by accounts is examined. The ideal that tweeting about scholarly articles represents curating and informing about state-of-the-art appears not to be realized in practice. We see much presumably human tweeting almost entirely mechanical and devoid of original thought, no evidence of conversation, tweets generated by monomania, duplicate tweeting from many accounts under centralized professional management and tweets generated by bots. Some accounts exemplify the ideal, but they represent less than 10% of tweets. Therefore, any conclusions drawn from twitter data is swamped by the mechanical nature of the bulk of tweeting behavior. In light of these results, we discuss the compatibility of Twitter with the research enterprise as well as some of the financial incentives behind these patterns.

Mapping social media attention in Microbiology: identifying main topics and actors

“…The selection of these sources is due to the following reasons. Twitter is the main general platform feeding altmetric data both in coverage of publications as well as intensity (Robinson-García et al 2014) and is the most researched of the social media platforms conforming altmetrics (Thelwall et al 2013;Robinson-Garcia et al 2017). Policy mentions and news media are the most robust sources in the sense that they are theoretically easier to interpret, and hence, to understand the underlying meaning behind them.…”

How do academic topics shift across altmetric sources? A case study of the research area of Big Data

“…Several possible explanations for this stronger similarity between Twitter hashtags and author keywords are taken into account. First, the substantial number of mechanical interactions with publications on Twitter makes it easy to generate tweets by clicking on the Twitter icon on the pages of journal articles, thus greatly increases the original content from these papers in the online discussion among Twitter users (Robinson-Garcia et al 2017). Secondly, the large amount of retweets produced by simply copying the original tweets (boyd et al 2010) increase the repetition rate of hashtags used on Twitter.…”

“…Considering the short titles of Wikipedia articles, we choose to use the first sentence in the summary which is a condensed explanation of an event, and is equivalent to the titles of blogs, news and policy documents in part. 5 This decision is also backed up by the results observed byRobinson-Garcia et al (2017) in which they found relatively low levels of engagement of tweeters with publication, therefore limiting the value of a semantic study based only on tweets' full text.…”

Making and Measuring an Impact in a Digital World: The Role of Social Media and the Medical Journal

“…Simply tweeting the article's title with no further editorialization may help with awareness that the article was published but does little to leverage what platforms like Twitter and Facebook do best: provide a forum for two‐way discussion and dialogue. Indeed, Robinson‐Garcia and colleagues published an article brilliantly titled “The Unbearable Emptiness of Tweeting—About Journal Articles,” which concluded that much of the “presumably human tweeting was duplicative, almost entirely mechanical and devoid of original thought.”…”