Twitter is well established as a platform through which academics can communicate with wider audiences. However, research indicates there are clear differences between certain subject communities in how effectively this happens. Marina Della Giusta describes how economists tweet less, mention fewer people and have fewer conversations with strangers, and use less accessible language with more abbreviations and a more distant […]
Category: Twitter
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, […]
Do we (mis)recognise the political power of Twitter?
We are told that Twitter is the new public sphere, the place where we hold government accountable, encourage diverse voices, and provide resources for public benefit like education, healthcare, and welfare. Using the #metoo campaign as a case study, Naomi Barnes and Huw Davies question whether Twitter really is a public sphere or if it is simply a platform capitalist […]
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 […]
Academic journals with a presence on Twitter are more widely disseminated and receive a higher number of citations
Previous research has shown that researchers’ active participation on Twitter can be a powerful way of promoting and disseminating academic outputs and improving the prospects of increased citations. But does the same hold true for the presence of academic journals on Twitter? José Luis Ortega examined the role of 350 scholarly journals, analysing how their articles were tweeted and cited. […]
New media, familiar dynamics: academic hierarchies influence academics’ following behaviour on Twitter
For what reasons do academics follow one another on Twitter? Robert Jäschke, Stephanie B. Linek and Christian P. Hoffmann analysed the Twitter activity of computer scientists and found that while the quality of information provided by a Twitter account is a key motive for following academic colleagues, there is also evidence of a career planning motive. As well as there […]
Scientific birds of a feather flock together: science communication on social media rarely happens across or beyond disciplinary boundaries
The success of academic research in reaching out beyond its own scientific community is a perennial concern, even more so following the rapid adoption of social media and the ability to easily transmit information to potentially millions of people. Consequently, many attempts have been made to capture the broad scientific impact beyond academia using social media data. But is increased […]
Using Twitter as a data source: an overview of social media research tools (updated for 2017)
Following his initial post on this topic in 2015, Wasim Ahmed has updated and expanded his rundown of the tools available to social scientists looking to analyse social media data. A number of new applications have been released in the intervening period, with the increasing complexity of certain research questions also having prompted some tools to increase their data retrieval […]
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 and citations is poor, actively participating on Twitter is a powerful way of […]
2016 in review: a selection of the top LSE Impact Blog posts of the year
Continuing what is by now an established Impact Blog tradition, editor Kieran Booluck looks back at all that’s published over the last twelve months and shares a selection of the year’s top posts. It’s been another record-breaking year at the Impact Blog! Last year was the first time we recorded in excess of one million pageviews in a single year, […]