In this edition of Wasim Ahmed’s long-running series on using Twitter data as a research tool, Wasim considers the significance of the newly introduced Twitter ‘academic research product track’ and the different ways in which Twitter …
Category: social media research
What ethical responsibilities do social media researchers have to report harmful or illegal content?
For researchers working on social media communities, especially in sensitive subject areas, there is a strong likelihood they will have encountered harmful or illegal content. In this post, Dr Liam McLoughlin discusses the ethical responsibilities rese…
Weibo – How is China’s second largest social media platform being used for social research?
Social media research in the global north is primarily focused on western social media platforms, notably Twitter and Facebook. In this post Shulin Hu describes how researchers have used data from Weibo, China’s second most popular social media platform, to undertake a variety of research projects and provides resources for researchers looking to use Weibo … Continued
More room for greater depth and detail: implications for academic research of Twitter’s expanded character limit
Twitter makes its data available in real-time and at no cost, making it a popular data source for many academic researchers. Wasim Ahmed discusses some of the implications of the decision to expand the character limit from 140 to 280. Greater space makes for greater depth and detail, addressing the difficulties of interpretation that 140-character tweets would sometimes present. However, […]
2017 in review: round-up of our top posts on communicating your research with social media
Twitter can help with scientific dissemination but its influence on citation impact is less clear Researchers have long been encouraged to use Twitter. But does researchers’ presence on Twitter influence citations to their papers? José Luis Ortega explored to what extent the participation of scholars on Twitter can influence the tweeting of their articles and found that although the relationship between tweets […]