Yingxin Estella Ye and Jin-Cheon Na
By analyzing journal articles with high citation counts but low Twitter mentions and vice versa, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overall picture of differences between…
Abstract
Purpose
By analyzing journal articles with high citation counts but low Twitter mentions and vice versa, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overall picture of differences between citation counts and Twitter mentions of academic articles.
Design/methodology/approach
Citation counts from the Web of Science and Twitter mentions of psychological articles under the Social Science Citation Index collection were collected for data analysis. An approach combining both statistical and simple content analysis was adopted to examine important factors contributing to citation counts and Twitter mentions, as well as the patterns of tweets mentioning academic articles.
Findings
Compared to citation counts, Twitter mentions have stronger affiliations with readability and accessibility of academic papers. Readability here was defined as the content size of articles and the usage of jargon and scientific expressions. In addition, Twitter activities, such as the use of hashtags and user mentions, could better facilitate the sharing of articles. Even though discussions of articles or related social phenomena were spotted in the contents of tweets, simple counts of Twitter mentions may not be reliable enough for research evaluations due to issues such as Twitter bots and a deficient understanding of Twitter users’ motivations for mentioning academic articles on Twitter.
Originality/value
This study has elaborated on the differences between Twitter mentions and citation counts by comparing the characteristics of Twitter-inclined and citation-inclined articles. It provides useful information for interested parties who would like to adopt social web metrics such as Twitter mentions as traces of broader engagement with academic literature and potential suggestions to increase the reliability of Twitter metrics. In addition, it gives specific tips for researchers to increase research visibility and get attention from the general public on Twitter.
Details
Keywords
Jin-Cheon Na and Yingxin Estella Ye
The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive understanding of scholarly discussions of academic publications on the social web and to further discuss the validity of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive understanding of scholarly discussions of academic publications on the social web and to further discuss the validity of altmetrics as a research impact assessment tool for academic articles.
Design/methodology/approach
Facebook posts citing psychological journal papers were collected for both quantitative and qualitative analyses. A content analysis approach was adopted to investigate topic preferences and motivations for scholarly discussions among academic and non-academic Facebook users.
Findings
Non-academic users were more actively engaged in scholarly discussions on Facebook than academic users. Among 1,711 Facebook users in the sample, 71.4 percent of them belonged to non-academic users, while 28.6 percent were from an academic background. The Facebook users cited psychological articles with various motivations: discussion and evaluation toward articles (20.4 percent), application to real life practices (16.5 percent), self-promotion (6.4 percent), and data source exchange (6.0 percent). However, nearly half of the posts (50.1 percent) were simply sharing articles without additional user comments. These results implicate that Facebook metric (a count of mentions of a research article on Facebook), as an important source of altmetrics, better reflects the attitudes or perceptions of the general public instead of academia.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the literature by enriching the understanding of Facebook metric as an academic and non-academic impact assessment tool for scientific publication. Through the content analysis of Facebook posts, it also draws insights into the ways in which non-academic audiences are engaging with scholarly outputs.