A Systematic Identification and Analysis of Scientists on Twitter

Metrics derived from Twitter and other social media---often referred to as altmetrics---are increasingly used to estimate the broader social impacts of scholarship. Such efforts, however, may produce highly misleading results, as the entities that participate in conversations about science on these platforms are largely unknown. For instance, if altmetric activities are generated mainly by scientists, does it really capture broader social impacts of science? Here we present a systematic approach to identifying and analyzing scientists on Twitter. Our method can identify scientists across many disciplines, without relying on external bibliographic data, and be easily adapted to identify other stakeholder groups in science. We investigate the demographics, sharing behaviors, and interconnectivity of the identified scientists. We find that Twitter has been employed by scholars across the disciplinary spectrum, with an over-representation of social and computer and information scientists; under-representation of mathematical, physical, and life scientists; and a better representation of women compared to scholarly publishing. Analysis of the sharing of URLs reveals a distinct imprint of scholarly sites, yet only a small fraction of shared URLs are science-related. We find an assortative mixing with respect to disciplines in the networks between scientists, suggesting the maintenance of disciplinary walls in social media. Our work contributes to the literature both methodologically and conceptually---we provide new methods for disambiguating and identifying particular actors on social media and describing the behaviors of scientists, thus providing foundational information for the construction and use of indicators on the basis of social media metrics

Leveraging Citation Networks to Visualize Scholarly Influence Over Time

Assessing the influence of a scholar's work is an important task for funding organizations, academic departments, and researchers. Common methods, such as measures of citation counts, can ignore much of the nuance and multidimensionality of scholarly influence. We present an approach for generating dynamic visualizations of scholars' careers. This approach uses an animated node-link diagram showing the citation network accumulated around the researcher over the course of the career in concert with key indicators, highlighting influence both within and across fields. We developed our design in collaboration with one funding organization---the Pew Biomedical Scholars program---but the methods are generalizable to visualizations of scholarly influence. We applied the design method to the Microsoft Academic Graph, which includes more than 120 million publications. We validate our abstractions throughout the process through collaboration with the Pew Biomedical Scholars program officers and summative evaluations with their scholars

The classical origin of modern mathematics

The aim of this paper is to study the historical evolution of mathematical thinking and its spatial spreading. To do so, we have collected and integrated data from different online academic datasets. In its final stage, the database includes a large number (N~200K) of advisor-student relationships, with affiliations and keywords on their research topic, over several centuries, from the 14th century until today. We focus on two different topics, the evolving importance of countries and of the research disciplines over time. Moreover we study the database at three levels, its global statistics, the mesoscale networks connecting countries and disciplines, and the genealogical level

A Multi-Relational Network to Support the Scholarly Communication Process

The general pupose of the scholarly communication process is to support the creation and dissemination of ideas within the scientific community. At a finer granularity, there exists multiple stages which, when confronted by a member of the community, have different requirements and therefore different solutions. In order to take a researcher's idea from an initial inspiration to a community resource, the scholarly communication infrastructure may be required to 1) provide a scientist initial seed ideas; 2) form a team of well suited collaborators; 3) located the most appropriate venue to publish the formalized idea; 4) determine the most appropriate peers to review the manuscript; and 5) disseminate the end product to the most interested members of the community. Through the various delinieations of this process, the requirements of each stage are tied soley to the multi-functional resources of the community: its researchers, its journals, and its manuscritps. It is within the collection of these resources and their inherent relationships that the solutions to scholarly communication are to be found. This paper describes an associative network composed of multiple scholarly artifacts that can be used as a medium for supporting the scholarly communication process.Comment: keywords: digital libraries and scholarly communicatio

Exploring the feasibility of international collaboration and relationship building through a virtual partnership scheme

International collaboration is an under-studied component of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). This study sheds light on the process of international collaboration by illustrating an exploratory approach to the process of forming and maintaining collaborative partnerships. Participants in this study were put into pairs (each one comprised of one individual from the University of Glasgow and another from the University of Wisconsin System) and asked to participate in email correspondence over the course of one year. The text of participants’ emails was pooled and analyzed through a general inductive approach using NVivo software. The study, though small in nature, helps to illustrate and further understand international collaborative relationships. We offer suggestions for future international collaborations and discuss the implications of emphasizing such partnerships within SoTL