What do we get from Twitter - and what not? A close look at Twitter research in the social sciences

The state of Twitter research in the social science domain is investigated based on a set of 25 highly cited papers, identified with the Scopus database out of 370 social science publications on social media research. The analysis shows how social media research in the social sciences has risen since 2007. The selected top cited papers are analyzed concerning their domains, the applied meth-ods and the underlying data in use. It is shown that different methods, both experimental and analytical are applied, and that some papers have started to combine different modes of analysis. The size of the datasets used for studying Twitter varies considerably across studies. Furthermore, central advantages of studying data collected from Twitter are pointed out and open challenges in working with these particular data are listed. Challenges include, for example, data access via the Twitter API or via third party tools, representativeness of datasets and sampling strategies and ethical issues. (author's abstract

Citations in Web 2.0

Citations are a classic dimension of scientific communication. This paper looks at two different scenarios in which citation analysis can be applied to novel Web 2.0 environments: One case study deals with citations on Twitter and the other with analyzing blog posts and social bookmarking systems. (Autorenreferat

Twitter as a first draft of the present - and the challenges of preserving it for the future

"This paper provides a framework for understanding Twitter as a historical source. We address digital humanities scholars to enable the transfer of concepts from traditional source criticism to new media formats, and to encourage the preservation of Twitter as a cultural artifact. Twitter has established itself as a key social media platform which plays an important role in public, real-time conversation. Twitter is also unique as its content is being archived by a public institution (the Library of Congress). In this paper we will show that we still have to assume that much of the contextual information beyond the pure tweet texts is already lost, and propose additional objectives for preservation." (author's abstract

Social media in academia: how the Social Web is changing academic practice and becoming a new source for research data

For the last few decades, the Internet continually has changed scholarly workflows across disciplines. It has affected how scholars search for publications, retrieve information and communicate and distribute their own research findings. Online communication and collaboration influences academic institutions as well as academic publishers, science journalists and students. Within this special issue, we focus on social media and its influence on academic practice. (auhtor's abstract

Analysing Timelines of National Histories across Wikipedia Editions: A Comparative Computational Approach

Portrayals of history are never complete, and each description inherently exhibits a specific viewpoint and emphasis. In this paper, we aim to automatically identify such differences by computing timelines and detecting temporal focal points of written history across languages on Wikipedia. In particular, we study articles related to the history of all UN member states and compare them in 30 language editions. We develop a computational approach that allows to identify focal points quantitatively, and find that Wikipedia narratives about national histories (i) are skewed towards more recent events (recency bias) and (ii) are distributed unevenly across the continents with significant focus on the history of European countries (Eurocentric bias). We also establish that national historical timelines vary across language editions, although average interlingual consensus is rather high. We hope that this paper provides a starting point for a broader computational analysis of written history on Wikipedia and elsewhere

How does the local wind field control the aerosol distribution in coastal Dronning Maud Land?

Atmospheric circulation patterns and chemical concentrations in firn cores are highly related to each other. Atmospheric winds transport aerosols like sea salt and mineral dust over the globe and redistribute them. Because of this, it is possible to reconstruct atmospheric circulation bringing aerosol to Antarctica by analyzing chemical impurities in firn and ice. With these analyses, the gap caused by sparse atmospheric measurements can be filled and this knowledge can then be used to improve the understanding of local and global circulation patterns.Due to a very high accumulation rate (~600 kg/m²*a), coastal Dronning Maud Land (CDML) is a perfect site to conduct these studies.Here, the upper 6m of two firn cores drilled on Halvfaryggen and Sörasen (covering the time interval from 2002- 2007) were analyzed on ionic concentrations. This data was then contrasted to measurements from the air chemistry laboratories at Neumayer (NM) and Kohnenstation (KS), and synoptic measurements from automatic weather stations (distributed in CDML and at NM).The analyses show very different results: Sea salt ions (e.g. Na+) are higher correlated to ions measured in aerosol samples at the air chemistry laboratory at KS than to the one located at NM. In contrast, ions representing mineral dust (e.g. nss-Ca2+) only have a weak correlation over the whole area and time period. Accordingly, the deposition of aerosol is highly dependent on its origin and the topography in coastal Antarctica suggesting different transport pathways for sea level and higher altitude sites

What increases (social) media attention: Research impact, author prominence or title attractiveness?

Do only major scientific breakthroughs hit the news and social media, or does a 'catchy' title help to attract public attention? How strong is the connection between the importance of a scientific paper and the (social) media attention it receives? In this study we investigate these questions by analysing the relationship between the observed attention and certain characteristics of scientific papers from two major multidisciplinary journals: Nature Communication (NC) and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). We describe papers by features based on the linguistic properties of their titles and centrality measures of their authors in their co-authorship network. We identify linguistic features and collaboration patterns that might be indicators for future attention, and are characteristic to different journals, research disciplines, and media sources.Comment: Paper presented at 23rd International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI 2018) in Leiden, The Netherland

Which social media interactions indicate positive opinions about cited publications? A comparison of user survey and sentiment analysis

One of the central questions in Altmetrics study is: which social media actions could be the best signal of positive stance towards scientific outcome? To investigate this question, a two-level study was performed. For one, we conducted an online survey and analyzed the results of more than 3,400 participants. Secondly, we performed sentiment analysis of comments in social media platforms and we investigated comments to social media posts (i.e. Reddit posts, YouTube videos, Google posts) that cite scientific articles and the comments section on the PLOS journal webpag