research-article

How is science clicked on Twitter? Click metrics for Bitly short links to scientific publications

Authors:

Rodrigo Costas,

Paul WoutersAuthors Info & Claims

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Volume 72, Issue 7

Pages 918 - 932

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24458

Published: 09 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

To provide some context for the potential engagement behavior of Twitter users around science, this article investigates how Bitly short links to scientific publications embedded in scholarly Twitter mentions are clicked on Twitter. Based on the click metrics of over 1.1 million Bitly short links referring to Web of Science (WoS) publications, our results show that around 49.5% of them were not clicked by Twitter users. For those Bitly short links with clicks from Twitter, the majority of their Twitter clicks accumulated within a short period of time after they were first tweeted. Bitly short links to the publications in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities tend to attract more clicks from Twitter over other subject fields. This article also assesses the extent to which Twitter clicks are correlated with some other impact indicators. Twitter clicks are weakly correlated with scholarly impact indicators (WoS citations and Mendeley readers), but moderately correlated to other Twitter engagement indicators (total retweets and total likes). In light of these results, we highlight the importance of paying more attention to the click metrics of URLs in scholarly Twitter mentions, to improve our understanding about the more effective dissemination and reception of science information on Twitter.

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Cited By

Soliman NKang HLatzke MBragg JChang JZhang AKarger D(2024)Mitigating Barriers to Public Social Interaction with Meronymous CommunicationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642241(1-26)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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Torres-Salinas DDocampo DArroyo-Machado WRobinson-Garcia N(2024)The many publics of science: using altmetrics to identify common communication channels by scientific fieldScientometrics10.1007/s11192-024-05077-1129:7(3705-3723)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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Index Terms

How is science clicked on Twitter? Click metrics for Bitly short links to scientific publications

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology Volume 72, Issue 7

July 2021

153 pages

ISSN:2330-1635

EISSN:2330-1643

DOI:10.1002/asi.v72.7

Issue’s Table of Contents

© 2021 The Authors. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Association for Information Science and Technology.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

United States

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Published: 09 June 2021

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Cited By

Soliman NKang HLatzke MBragg JChang JZhang AKarger D(2024)Mitigating Barriers to Public Social Interaction with Meronymous CommunicationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642241(1-26)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642241
Torres-Salinas DDocampo DArroyo-Machado WRobinson-Garcia N(2024)The many publics of science: using altmetrics to identify common communication channels by scientific fieldScientometrics10.1007/s11192-024-05077-1129:7(3705-3723)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11192-024-05077-1
Tian WFang ZWang XCostas R(2024)A multi-dimensional analysis of usage counts, Mendeley readership, and citations for journal and conference papersScientometrics10.1007/s11192-023-04909-w129:2(985-1013)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11192-023-04909-w
Amiri MYaghtin MSotudeh H(2024)How do tweeters feel about scientific misinformation: an infoveillance sentiment analysis of tweets on retraction notices and retracted papersScientometrics10.1007/s11192-023-04871-7129:1(261-287)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
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Cao RLiu XFang ZXu XWang X(2023)How do scientific papers from different journal tiers gain attention on social media?Information Processing and Management: an International Journal10.1016/j.ipm.2022.10315260:1Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ipm.2022.103152
Kang HKocielnik RHead AYang JLatzke MKittur AWeld DDowney DBragg J(2022)From Who You Know to What You Read: Augmenting Scientific Recommendations with Implicit Social NetworksProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517470(1-23)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3517470
Orduña-Malea EFont-Julián C(2022)Are patents linked on Twitter? A case study of Google patentsScientometrics10.1007/s11192-022-04519-y127:11(6339-6362)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2022
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Fang ZCostas RWouters P(2022)User engagement with scholarly tweets of scientific papers: a large-scale and cross-disciplinary analysisScientometrics10.1007/s11192-022-04468-6127:8(4523-4546)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11192-022-04468-6

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