Starting this week, ScholCommLab co-director Stefanie Haustein is publishing a series of guest posts on the Altmetric Blog about the role of Twitter in scholarly communication. Read on for a small taste of what to expect, and find the whole series at at altmetric.com/blog/.
It’s almost been a decade since altmetrics and social media-based metrics were introduced. Since those early days they have been heralded as indicators of the societal impact of research—after all we all like, comment and share things on social media. An early study had seen tweets to predict citation impact shortly after an article was published, which got hopes up that Twitter activity could serve as an early indicator of research impact. However, the analysis was soon followed by several large-scale correlation studies, which showed that there is hardly any connection between tweet and citation counts. But other than proving that Twitter activity did not measure the same type of impact as those reflected by citations, low correlations did not help to understand what tweets linking to scholarly publications did actually measure.
This mini series on scholarly Twitter metrics, to be published on the Altmetric blog over the next five weeks, will explore the What,Where, How, When and Who of academic Twitter, to shed some light on the significance of tweets in the context of social media metrics. The blog posts are based on a book chapter [1] for the Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Indicators edited by Wolfgang Glänzel, Henk Moed, Ulrich Schmoch and Mike Thelwall, which will be published later this year. A preprint of the chapter is available on arXiv.