How Scholars Are Using Twitter

prevalence and use of Twitter among scholars by @jasonpriem, @k8lin, @silent_d from @uncsils 1in 40 method no one rank (x-11.2, df-4, p-.12) or discipline e=2.4, df- 1, p-.02)* is significantly over-represented on Twitter: We selected five diverse, representative US and UK universities Using manual searches of department web pages, we compiled a list of all the scholars (defined as fulltime faculty, postdocs, or doctoral students) at each one, yeilding a sample of 8,826. scholars active on Twitter We then used the Twitter user/search API to find Twitter user profiles that matched our scholars' names. 3,019 scholars returned more that 20 potential name matches: this "common-name group" was removed from the sample. The remaining scholars retumed 17.177 Twitter accounts: around half of these had no identifying information and were discarded. For the remaining 8.038 accounts, we we used a combination of automatic scripts and manual inspection to make positive matches between scholars and accounts, considering evidence from departmental webpages and the Twitter profile fields for name, location, description, URL, username, and picture. on not on Twitter Twitter faculty 5 tweets O per week This gave us a list of 230 scholars with confirmed Twitter accounts; this number is certainly an undercount, since many accounts did not have enough information for a positive ID. We then returned to the Twitter API to gather all the public tweets for nonfaculty these users. humanities scholarly Twitter use is growing natural sei percent of tweets that are scholarly: formal sci social sci nonfaculty: applied/prof *We use .01 signitficance level due to the high nand large number of tests faculty: 160 scholars tweet about their scholarship 140 not scholarly scholars' experience 120 scholarly link (not reviewed) logistic scholarly link (peer reviewed) scholarly content Each scholars last 20 tweets n-2.774) were independenty coded by two of the thors (Cohen's kappa.77 We counted the last four codes as scholarly 60 40 • faculty tweets • nonfaculty tweets 20 2008 2009 2010 2011 100% code + details available at https://github.com/jasonpriem/5uni-Twitter-study presented at Metrics 2011 Symposium on Informetric and Scientometric Research scholars' Twitter accounts ithout tweets not shown) percent scholarly tweets, by account