Who and why Twitter users tweet on journal articles : a comparative analysis of readers of medicine and political science journal articles

• Main Author: Mohd Ismail Hussein
• Other Authors: Na Jin Cheon
• Format: Thesis-Master by Coursework
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Library and information science::Libraries::Technologies
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/136624
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Ever since its launch, Twitter has continued to attract a large base of technology-savvy users who enjoy the ease and convenience of networking, seeking and sharing information online. Scholars and publishers have come to recognize the potential of Twitter to promote, share and discuss scholarly work but have not yet fully understood who tweets about scholarly work and why they tweet about research articles. This study aimed to provide an insight on the type of people who tweet about research work and their motivations for doing so. It compared the profiles and purposes of Twitter users who tweet on medicine and political science articles to understand similarities and differences of tweets on two distinctively different disciplines. Tweets that mention scholarly work are extracted from Altmetric and Twitter. Content analysis and machine learning techniques were then applied to classify the type of Twitter users who originate these tweets, and to classify their motivation to tweet. The results from the study revealed that different disciplines attract different profiles of users. Medicine articles had a stronger appeal to the general public, while political science articles attracted a higher percentage of academics. The study also revealed that different user types have different motivations in using Twitter. Academics and publishers tended to capitalize on Twitter to promote their work, while non-academics mainly shared research work and to a lesser extent, expressed their opinions on the research.