Poster by Katrin Weller & Cornelius Puschmann. Presented at Web Science Conference 2011, Koblenz, Germany. June 2011.

1. Twitter for Scientific Communication
How can Citations/References be Identified and Measured?
Researchers Group „Science and the Internet“ Dr. Katrin Weller Dr. Cornelius Puschmann
(Nachwuchsforschergruppe „Wissenschaft und Internet“, NFGWIN) Dept. of Information Science, HHU Düsseldorf Dept. for English Language and Linguistics, HHU Düsseldorf
Katrin Weller & Cornelius Puschmann Web: http://www.nfgwin.uni-duesseldorf.de Email: weller@uni-duesseldorf.de Email: cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de
Twitter: #nfgwin Twitter: @kwelle Twitter: @coffee001
3 Datasets 2 Types of Citations/References
http://
Conference Conference scientwists:
tweets: tweets: Tweets by selected Internal Citations External Citations
#www2010 #mla09 scientific users
• 903 unique users • 369 unique users • 589 selected users • User-related citations • Resource-related citations
• 3,358 tweets • 1,929 tweets • 410,609 tweets • Retweets (RTs) within Twitter • Links (URLs) to external resources
• 13.04.-14.05.2010 • 15.12.’09-14.01.’10 • 07.01.-31.08.2010 • Reference to other users / • References to various types of
quotation of tweets Web content
• Users cite and are cited • Users cite, websites are cited
How do Scientists Cite on Twitter?
Internal citations: Percentage of retweets External citations: Percentage of tweets that include at least one URL
#www2010 #mla09 scientwists #www2010 #mla09 scientwists
413
92,225
21%
1,121 22%
525; 27%
33% 1,338
40% 227,550
55%
Distribution of internal citations Different ways of counting external citations Overlap of external and internal citations
Distribution of given and received retweets for Distribution of given and received retweets for
number of RTs received for or given by
#www2010 #mla09 #www2010 #mla09 scientwists
number of RTs received for or given by
90 60
80 RTs received
RTs received Number (and %) of tweets 1,338 525 227,550
person on rank n
50
70 RTs given including at least one URL (39.85%) (27.22%) (55.42%)
RTs given
person on rank n
60 40
50
30
Number of total URLs 1,460 551 234,731
40
30 20 Number of unique URLs 574 199 Approx. 180.000* URLs
20 239 10 89
10
0 0
227,550 RTs with
1 51 101 151 201 251 301 351 401 451 501 551 1 21 41 61 81 101 121 141 161 181
person on rank n person on rank n URL
RTs
58,525
92,225
External citations: What is highly cited? External citations: Which websites are highly cited?*
* Preliminary results, automatic URL clustering is currently being refined.
9000 9000
scientwists
URLs from 8000
Blog Blog
Blog
scientwists
8000 7000
6000
7000 5000 RTs
URLs RTs with
with
4000 URLs RTs
Publi- 6000 3000 1,338
URL
530
RTs 525 URL
270
414
2000
1,121
Rank 1: 41 times cation Rank 1: 27 times 5000 1000
0
4000 1 101 201 301 401 501 601 701 801 901
Rank 2: 35 times
Twitter Blog 3000
2000
Top 30 #www2010 #mla09
Rank 3: 29 times Error Blog 1000
Confe- Rank 4
Rank 2: 23 times
Internal citations: Highly cited tweets from #mla09
rence Rank 3: 22 times 0
Confe
Error
www.scientificamerican.com
twitpic.com
www.nytimes.com
yfrog.com
blip.fm
www.scientistsolutions.com
news.google.com
feedproxy.google.com
news.discovery.com
www.tumblr.com
www.guardian.co.uk
feeds.wired.com
www.nature.com
blogs.nature.com
friendfeed.com
blogs.discovermagazine.com
openparachute.wordpress.com
foursquare.com
www.facebook.com
news.bbc.co.uk
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
lockerz.com
is.gd
www.newscientist.com
scienceblogs.com
www.labspaces.net
www.microbeworld.org
www.flickr.com
www.youtube.com
Rank 5 rence Confe-
rence Tweet text and ID From User RTs
Rank 6
Slides Rank 7 Rank 4
Press Hey, guys, I've blogged about "the amplification of amandafrench 18
Rank 8 Confe- Rank 5 URL No. 1 scholarly communication": Twitter, #MLA09,
rence Blog @briancroxall, & such: http://bit.ly/7SRgqZ (ID:
#www2010 Rank 9
Press Press
Rank 7
Rank 6
#mla09 7221520139)
Rank 8 New at ProfHacker: “Academics and Social Media: profhacker 17
Blog URL No. 5 #mla09 and Twitter,” by @GeorgeOnline (and a
Rank 9 bunch of you): http://wp.me/pAGUw-19K (ID:
7566711357)
URL No. 3 "Monopolies of Invention:" text of my #MLA09 talk nowviskie 16
on labor & IP issues in humanities collaboration:
External citations: What types of websites are cited? http://is.gd/5Gckz (ID: 7185970970)
Categories of URLs from #www2010 Categories of URLs from #www2010 Categories of URLs from #mla09 Categories of URLs from #mla09
(counting all URLs, n=551) (counting unique URLs only, n=199)
(counting unique URLs only, n=574) (counting all URLs, n=1460)
Twitter; 22
Other; 36 Other; 20
External citations: Frequency of URLs in conference datasets
Conference; Other; 169 Twitter; 14
37 Publication; 4 Distribution of URLs from #www2010 Distribution of URLs from #mla09
Twitter; 31 Twitter; 76 Slides; 0
Blog; 68 Slides; 0 45 30
Other; 94 Blog; 222
Frequency of URL on rank n
40
Frequency of URL on rank n
Slides; 106 Project; 11 #www2010 25 #mla09
Blog; 54 35
Conference; Publication; 3 30 20
206 Blog; 229 25
Slides; 45 15
Error; 92 Press; 123 Project; 5 20
Publication;
135 Press; 34 15 10
10
Error; 201 5
5
Publication; Project; 116 0 0
Media; 71 Media; 34 Error; 28
1
31
61
91
121
451
151
181
211
241
271
301
331
361
391
421
481
511
541
151
101
111
121
131
141
161
171
181
191
11
21
31
41
51
61
71
81
91
1
52 Error; 69 Conference;
Conference; 16
Press; 92 Media; 137 Media; 25 URL on rank n (ranked by frequency)
23 URL on rank n (ranked by frequency)
Project; 51 Press; 33
Poster presented at Web Science Conference 2011 (#websci11), Koblenz, Germany, June 14-17, 2011. More on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/katrinweller
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Evelyn Dröge, Wolfgang G. Stock, Julia Verbina, Parinaz Maghferat.
The research group “Science and the Internet” is funded by the “Forschungsförderungsfonds”, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf.