What do computer scientists tweet? Analyzing the link-sharing practice on Twitter

Abstract

Twitter communication has permeated every sphere of society. To highlight and share small pieces of information with possibly vast audiences or small circles of the interested has some value in almost any aspect of social life. But what is the value exactly for a scientific field? We perform a comprehensive study of computer scientists using Twitter and their tweeting behavior concerning the sharing of web links. Discerning the domains, hosts and individual web pages being tweeted and the differences between computer scientists and a Twitter sample enables us to look in depth at the Twitter-based information sharing practices of a scientific community. Additionally, we aim at providing a deeper understanding of the role and impact of altmetrics in computer science and give a glance at the publications mentioned on Twitter that are most relevant for the computer science community. Our results show a link sharing culture that concentrates more heavily on public and professional quality information than the Twitter sample does. The results also show a broad variety in linked sources and especially in linked publications with some publications clearly related to community-specific interests of computer scientists, while others with a strong relation to attention mechanisms in social media. This refers to the observation that Twitter is a hybrid form of social media between an information service and a social network service. Overall the computer scientists’ style of usage seems to be more on the information-oriented side and to some degree also on professional usage. Therefore, altmetrics are of considerable use in analyzing computer science.

Understanding high- and low-quality URL Sharing on COVID-19 Twitter streams

“…While we do not have a random sample of tweets to compare this to, studies of different user groups have shown high levels of information sharing among the group, e.g. computer scientists [49]. While those levels are higher than the levels in our data set, it is clear that URL information sharing is occurring and may reflect the incredible need for information in this uncertain time [4,5].…”

Spanish academics and social networking sites: Use, non-use, and the perceived advantages and drawbacks of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu

“…The research reported here has a twofold objective: to determine academics' motives for engaging in online social networking and the ways in which they use both generalist and academic networking sites. To this end, we address the gap in the literature on individual practices on SNS (Veletsianos and Kimmons, 2016;Schmitt and Jäschke, 2017). We also identify the main motives that deter some academics from using these platforms and, specifically, focus on those factors that dissuade them from using SNS professionally.…”

“People are reading your work,” scholarly identity and social networking sites

“…A majority of respondents to a survey conducted by Haustein et al (2014a) indicated that academic networking sites affected their professional lives both negatively (e.g., encouraging procrastination) and positively (e.g., aiding organization of research material). However, specialized academic networking sites are not the only tools scholars employ for scholarly identity endeavors; they also appropriate affordances of more general social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to promote themselves and their research (e.g., Priem and Costello, 2010; Schmitt and Jäschke, 2017). Activity surrounding recently published articles on academic networking sites such as Twitter may increase citations, predict citations and compliment citation metrics with measures of social impact (Priem and Costello, 2010; Eysenbach, 2011; Haustein et al , 2014b; Nabout et al , 2018).…”

“…Ortega (2015a) found that humanists and social scientists frequently used Academia.edu and connected with other researchers, while biologists chose ResearchGate and did not make these connections as often. Computer scientists may choose platforms such as Twitter for both information-oriented and professional purposes (Schmitt and Jäschke, 2017).…”