Bibliometrics

This work revisits the relationship between tweets and citations from a new information behavior perspective, where the tweet (and not the tweeted publication) is the unit of analysis. The main question is to determine if, at the individual level, the act of tweeting a given publication is a good predictor of the act of citing that same publication. Also, we investigate how the relationship between tweeting and citing is influenced by the research activity of the tweeter and its relationship to the tweeted paper.

The goal of this research collaboration between the QSS lab and the Environmental Information Use and Influence (EIUI) group is to contribute to the discussion by providing an empirical basis for assessing the unequal representation and attention that different bodies of literature receive in social media specifically. Our research questions are: What distinct communities can be identified within the shark scholarship? How is scientific attention distributed across these communities? How is media attention distributed across these communities? To what extent do researchers themselves contribute to the dissemination the research on social media? We will then discuss the implications of a potentially skewed coverage of media attention for policy and the societal understanding of an issue, and the role that information literacy may play in improving science-society interactions on social media and improve policy and decision-making processes.