Kim Holmberg

Disciplinary differences in Twitter scholarly communication

This paper investigates disciplinary differences in how researchers use the microblogging site Twitter. Tweets from selected researchers in ten disciplines (astrophysics, biochemistry, digital humanities, economics, history of science, cheminformatics, cognitive science, drug discovery, social network analysis, and sociology) were collected and analyzed both statistically and qualitatively. The researchers tended to share more links and retweet more than the average Twitter users in earlier research and there were clear disciplinary differences in how they used Twitter. Biochemists retweeted substantially more than researchers in the other disciplines. Researchers in digital humanities and cognitive science used Twitter more for conversations, while researchers in economics shared the most links. Finally, whilst researchers in biochemistry, astrophysics, cheminformatics and digital humanities seemed to use Twitter for scholarly communication, scientific use of Twitter in economics, sociology and history of science appeared to be marginal.

Climate change on Twitter: topics, communities and conversations about the 2013 IPCC Working Group 1 report

In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 report, the first comprehensive assessment of physical climate science in six years, constituting a critical event in the societal debate about climate change. This paper analyses the nature of this debate in one public forum: Twitter. Using statistical methods, tweets were analyzed to discover the hashtags used when people tweeted about the IPCC report, and how Twitter users formed communities around their conversational connections. In short, the paper presents the topics and tweeters at this particular moment in the climate debate. The most used hashtags related to themes of science, geographical location and social issues connected to climate change. Particularly noteworthy were tweets connected to Australian politics, US politics, geoengineering and fracking. Three communities of Twitter users were identified. Researcher coding of Twitter users showed how these varied according to geographical location and whether users were supportive, unsupportive or neutral in their tweets about the IPCC. Overall, users were most likely to converse with users holding similar views. However, qualitative analysis suggested the emergence of a community of Twitter users, predominantly based in the UK, where greater interaction between contrasting views took place. This analysis also illustrated the presence of a campaign by the non-governmental organization Avaaz, aimed at increasing media coverage of the IPCC report.

Tweets as impact indicators: Examining the implications of automated bot accounts on Twitter

This brief communication presents preliminary findings on automated Twitter accounts distributing links to scientific articles deposited on the preprint repository arXiv. It discusses the implication of the presence of such bots from the perspective of social media metrics (altmetrics), where mentions of scholarly documents on Twitter have been suggested as a means of measuring impact that is both broader and timelier than citations. Our results show that automated Twitter accounts create a considerable amount of tweets to scientific articles and that they behave differently than common social bots, which has critical implications for the use of raw tweet counts in research evaluation and assessment. We discuss some definitions of Twitter cyborgs and bots in scholarly communication and propose distinguishing between different levels of engagement—that is, differentiating between tweeting only bibliographic information to discussing or commenting on the content of a scientific work.

Social Capital in Second Life

Purpose: Second Life is a user-created online virtual world, which is a place where people with shared interests can meet and be together and share information. The purpose of this study is to inve ...

Local government web sites in Finland: A geographic and webometric analysis

It has been shown that information collected from and about links between web pages and web sites can reflect real world phenomena and relationships between the organizations they represent. Yet, government linking has not been extensively studied from a webometric point of view. The aim of this study was to increase the knowledge of governmental interlinking and to shed some light on the possible real world phenomena it may indicate. We show that interlinking between local government bodies in Finland follows a strong geographic, or rather a geopolitical pattern and that governmental interlinking is mostly motivated by official cooperation that geographic adjacency has made possible.

Astrophysicists on Twitter: An in-depth analysis of tweeting and scientific publication behavior

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the tweeting behavior of 37 astrophysicists on Twitter and compares their tweeting behavior with their publication behavior and citation impact to show whether they tweet research-related topics or not. Design/methodology/approach – Astrophysicists on Twitter are selected to compare their tweets with their publications from Web of Science. Different user groups are identified based on tweeting and publication frequency. Findings – A moderate negative correlation (ρ=−0.339) is found between the number of publications and tweets per day, while retweet and citation rates do not correlate. The similarity between tweets and abstracts is very low (cos=0.081). User groups show different tweeting behavior such as retweeting and including hashtags, usernames and URLs. Research limitations/implications – The study is limited in terms of the small set of astrophysicists. Results are not necessarily representative of the entire astrophysicist community on Twitter and ...

Co-inlinking to a municipal Web space: a webometric and content analysis

It is known that there are significant correlations between linking and geographical patterns. Although interlinking patterns have been studied in various contexts, co-inlinking patterns on the Web have only been studied as indicator of business competitive positions. This research studies the use of co-inlinks to local government Web sites, assesses whether co-inlinking follows geographic patterns and investigates reasons for creating the co-inlinks. Strong evidence was found that co-inlinking is more frequent to municipalities in the same functional region than to municipalities in different functional regions, indicating that this geographic aspect influences co-inlinking, even though geographic co-inlinking was not a strong trend overall. Because the functional regions are created based on cooperation between the municipalities, we have indirectly been able to map cooperation from co-inlinking patterns on the Web. The main reason to create co-inlinking links to municipalities was that the source of the links wanted to show a connection to its region.

What is Librarian 2.0 – New competencies or interactive relations? A library professional viewpoint

Library 2.0 is a change in the way libraries interact with their users. Technological developments on the Web have had a major influence on these changes. The change also places new requirements on librarians’ competencies and skills. This research investigates how librarians themselves see this change in terms of their work identity and working knowledge. The research shows what kinds of qualities and characteristics are expected from a ‘Librarian 2.0’, according to a group of professional librarians. The results associate ‘Librarian 2.0’ firmly with the Web, although some of the more traditional characteristics of librarianship have retained their relevance. This research also shows that the change towards a ‘Librarian 2.0’ can be seen as intimidating by some librarians, a fact that has to be taken into account when libraries develop their future strategies.

Astrophysicists’ conversational connections on Twitter

Because Twitter and other social media are increasingly used for analyses based on altmetrics, this research sought to understand what contexts, affordance use, and social activities influence the tweeting behavior of astrophysicists. Thus, the presented study has been guided by three research questions that consider the influence of astrophysicists’ activities (i.e., publishing and tweeting frequency) and of their tweet construction and affordance use (i.e. use of hashtags, language, and emotions) on the conversational connections they have on Twitter. We found that astrophysicists communicate with a variety of user types (e.g. colleagues, science communicators, other researchers, and educators) and that in the ego networks of the astrophysicists clear groups consisting of users with different professional roles can be distinguished. Interestingly, the analysis of noun phrases and hashtags showed that when the astrophysicists address the different groups of very different professional composition they use very similar terminology, but that they do not talk to each other (i.e. mentioning other user names in tweets). The results also showed that in those areas of the ego networks that tweeted more the sentiment of the tweets tended to be closer to neutral, connecting frequent tweeting with information sharing activities rather than conversations or expressing opinions.

Gender differences in the climate change communication on Twitter

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a study about gender differences in the climate change communication on Twitter and in the use of affordances on Twitter. Design/methodology/approach – The data set consists of about 250,000 tweets and retweets for which the authors’ gender was identified. While content of tweets and hashtags used were analysed for common topics and specific contexts, the usernames that were proportionately more frequently mentioned by either male or female tweeters were coded according to the usernames’ stance in the climate change debate into convinced (that climate change is caused by humans), sceptics, neutrals and unclear groups, and according to the type or role of the user account (e.g. campaign, organization, private person). Findings – The results indicate that overall male and female tweeters use very similar language in their tweets, but clear differences were observed in the use of hashtags and usernames, with female tweeters mentioning significantly more campa...