What we can learn from tweets linking to research papers

Abstract

To explore whether there are other factors than count and sentiment that should be incorporated in evaluating research papers with social media mentions, this paper analyses the content of tweets linking to the top 100 papers of 2015 taken from www.altmetric.com, focusing on the goals, functions and features of research. We discuss three basic issues inherent in using tweets for research evaluation: whose tweets can be used to assess a paper, what objects can be evaluated, and how to score the paper according to each tweet. We suggest that tweets written by those involved in publication of the paper in question should not be included in the paper’s evaluation. Tweets unrelated to the content of the paper should also be excluded. Because controversies in research are inevitable and difficult to resolve, we suggest omitting somewhat supportive and negative tweets in research evaluation. Logically, neutral tweets (such as those linking to, and excerpts from, papers) express a degree of compliment, agreement, interest, or surprise, albeit less so than the tweets explicitly expressing these sentiments. Recommendation tweets also reflect one or more of these sentiments. Expansion tweets, which are inspired by the papers, reflect the function of research. Therefore, we suggest giving a higher weight to praise, agreement, interest, surprise, recommendation and expansion tweets linking to an academic paper than neutral tweets when scoring a paper. Issues related to electronic publishing and social media as learned from tweets are also discussed.