Tweets of Scholarly Papers on Twitter

A considerable amount of scholarly articles are disseminated on Twitter. The current research aims to analyze the dissemination of around 45 million tweets of scientific papers as a sample of altmetric capabilities in big data analysis on social web. The current study is an applied research in terms of objectives while it is a descriptive and survey in terms of data analysis and conducted using altmetric indicators. Research sample consisted of all 44,828,322 tweets and retweets of more than 676,400 papers obtained from Altmetric Explorer at the time of data collection in November 2017.
Findings: Results of the study revealed that %78.8 of all mentions of scientific papers in social web were on Twitter. Temporal investigation of tweets showed a considerable increase in the number of scientific papers which have been shared on Twitter during the time under consideration. The highest share of tweets and the most number of tweeters were found to be from the United States, The UK and Australia. Moreover, research output published in medical science as well as multidisciplinary sciences journals were tweeted more frequently than other research areas. Twitter has been identified as the most important social media platform and altmetric source for sharing of research output. It has a large potential to measure the social impact of scientific output.