Library and Information Science Papers Discussed on Twitter: A new Network-based Approach for Measuring Public Attention

Abstract

In recent years, one can witness a trend in research evaluation to measure the impact on society or attention to research by society (beyond science). We address the following question: Can Twitter be meaningfully used for the mapping of public and scientific discourses? Recently, Haunschild et al. (2019) introduced a new network-oriented approach for using Twitter data in research evaluation. Such a procedure can be used to measure the public discussion around a specific field or topic. In this study, we used all papers published in the Web of Science (WoS, Clarivate Analytics) subject category Information Science & Library Science to explore the publicly discussed topics from the area of library and information science (LIS) in comparison to the topics used by scholars in their publications in this area. The results show that LIS papers are represented rather well on Twitter. Similar topics appear in the networks of author keywords of all LIS papers, not tweeted LIS papers, and tweeted LIS papers. The networks of the author keywords of all LIS papers and not tweeted LIS papers are most similar to each other. Only papers published since 2011 with DOI were analyzed. Although Twitter data do not seem to be useful for quantitative research evaluation, it seems that Twitter data can be used in a more qualitative way for mapping of public and scientific discourses. This study explores a rather new methodology for comparing public and scientific discourses.