Do you cite what you tweet?

Maddie Hare, Geoff Krause, Keith MacKnight, Mercy Chikezie, Timothy D. Bowman, Rodrigo Costas, Philippe Mongeon

A mini introduction to bibliometrics

• Peer-reviewed scholarly works are contributions to the advancement of knowledge.

• Because researchers cite their sources, citations can measure the use (or impact? Quality? Importance?) of a contribution to knowledge.

A mini introduction to altmetrics

• Papers aren’t just cited in other papers, they get tweeted, liked, shared, discussed, added to reference managers, and cited in policy documents, patents, or the news.

• The number of engagements a paper receives is an indication of something.

  • Social impact?

  • Future citations?

The rise of altmetrics services

The rise of almetric indicators

What do tweets measure?

What do tweets measure?

What do tweets measure?

What do tweets measure?

What do tweets measure?

What do tweets measure?

what do tweets measure?

What do tweets measure?

Haustein, Toupin, & Alperin (2018)

Tweeting as contextualized engagement with scholarly works

What is in a tweet?

(Haustein, Bowman, and Costas 2015)

What is in a tweet?

Dimensions of the relationship between tweeters and tweeted IDs

Objectives of our present work

Our work examines the relationship between the act of tweeting and citing a paper considering the characteristics of the tweeter and their work, the tweeted paper and its authors, and the relationship between them.

In other words: Do researchers cite what they tweet?

Dimensions and variables

Dimensions	Variables
Geographic	Same country, Same institution
Socio-topical	Same domain, Same field, Same subfield, Same journal, Co-author, Self-Tweet
Individual	Academic age, Number of tweets, Number of papers, number of references

Data

• Open dataset of 500,000 scholars on Twitter (Mongeon, Bowman, and Costas 2023)

• Open dataset of scholars and scholarly works (OpenAlex) (Priem, Piwowar, and Orr 2022)

• Open dataset of tweets with links to DOIs (CrossRef)

• A classification of journals (Archambault, Beauchesne, and Caruso 2011)

• Our dataset: 5.3M tweets with data for all variables considered.

Results

Geographic dimension

Socio-topical dimension

Academic age

Number of tweets

Number of papers and references

Logistic regression model

Conclusion

References

Archambault, Éric, Olivier H. Beauchesne, and Julie Caruso. 2011. “Towards a Multilingual, Comprehensive and Open Scientific Journal Ontology.” In, 6677. Durban South Africa.

Haustein, Stefanie, Timothy D. Bowman, and Rodrigo Costas. 2015. “Interpreting "Altmetrics": Viewing Acts on Social Media Through the Lens of Citation and Social Theories.” https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.1502.05701.

Mongeon, Philippe, Timothy D. Bowman, and Rodrigo Costas. 2023. “An Open Data Set of Scholars on Twitter.” Quantitative Science Studies, April, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00250.

Priem, Jason, Heather Piwowar, and Richard Orr. 2022. “OpenAlex: A Fully-Open Index of Scholarly Works, Authors, Venues, Institutions, and Concepts,” June. http://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01833.