Towards a second generation of ‘altmetrics’: Characterizing the interactions of Twitter communities of attention around science Article Swipe

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Adrián A. Díaz‐Faes , Timothy D. Bowman , Rodrigo Costas ·

YOU? · · 2019 · Open Access · · DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal

‘Social media metrics’ are bursting into science studies as emerging new measures of \nimpact related to scholarly activities. However, their meaning and scope as scholarly metrics \nis still far from being grasped. This research seeks to shift focus from the consideration of \nsocial media metrics around science as mere indicators confined to the analysis of the use \nand visibility of publications on social media to their consideration as metrics of interaction \nand circulation of scientific knowledge across different communities of attention, and particularly \nas metrics that can also be used to characterize these communities. Although recent \nresearch efforts have proposed tentative typologies of social media users, no study has \nempirically examined the full range of Twitter user’s behavior within Twitter and disclosed \nthe latent dimensions in which activity on Twitter around science can be classified. To do so, \nwe draw on the overall activity of social media users on Twitter interacting with research \nobjects collected from the Altmetic.com database. Data from over 1.3 million unique users, \naccounting for over 14 million tweets to scientific publications, is analyzed. Based on an \nexploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, four latent dimensions are identified: ‘Science \nEngagement’, ‘Social Media Capital’, ‘Social Media Activity’ and ‘Science Focus’. Evidence \non the predominant type of users by each of the four dimensions is provided by means of \nVOSviewer term maps of Twitter profile descriptions. This research breaks new ground for \nthe systematic analysis and characterization of social media users’ activity around science.

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Altmetrics Social media Citizen science Data science Computer science Internet privacy World Wide Web Physics Astronomy

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Type: article
Language: en
Landing Page: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/198906
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal

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Title: Towards a second generation of ‘altmetrics’: Characterizing the interactions of Twitter communities of attention around science

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Language: en

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Publication year: 2019

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Publication date: 2019-01-01

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Authors: Adrián A. Díaz‐Faes, Timothy D. Bowman, Rodrigo Costas

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Landing page: https://hdl.handle.net/10261/198906

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Concepts: Altmetrics, Social media, Citizen science, Data science, Computer science, Internet privacy, World Wide Web, Physics, Astronomy

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