Twitter accounts have already been used in many scientometric studies, but
the meaningfulness of the data for societal impact measurements in research
evaluation has been questioned. Earlier research focused on social media counts
and neglected the interactive nature of the data. We explore a new network
approach based on Twitter data in which we compare author keywords to hashtags
as indicators of topics. We analyze the topics of tweeted publications and
compare them with the topics of all publications (tweeted and not tweeted). Our
exploratory study is based on a comprehensive publication set of climate change
research. We are interested in whether Twitter data are able to reveal topics
of public discussions which can be separated from research-focused topics. We
find that the most tweeted topics regarding climate change research focus on
the consequences of climate change for humans. Twitter users are interested in
climate change publications which forecast effects of a changing climate on the
environment and to adaptation, mitigation and management issues rather than in
the methodology of climate-change research and causes of climate change. Our
results indicate that publications using scientific jargon are less likely to
be tweeted than publications using more general keywords. Twitter networks seem
to be able to visualize public discussions about specific topics.Comment: 31 pages, 1 table, and 7 figure