Library and Information Science Papers Discussed on Twitter: A new Network-based Approach for Measuring Public Attention
Article Category: Research Paper
Published Online: Jul 03, 2020
Page range: 5 - 17
Received: Jan 21, 2020
Accepted: May 20, 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2020-0017
Keywords
© 2020 Robin Haunschild et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Purpose
In recent years, one can witness a trend in research evaluation to measure the impact on society or attention to research by society (beyond science). We address the following question: can Twitter be meaningfully used for the mapping of public and scientific discourses?
Design/methodology/approach
Recently,
Findings
The results show that LIS papers are represented rather well on Twitter. Similar topics appear in the networks of author keywords of all LIS papers, not tweeted LIS papers, and tweeted LIS papers. The networks of the author keywords of all LIS papers and not tweeted LIS papers are most similar to each other.
Research limitations
Only papers published since 2011 with DOI were analyzed.
Practical implications
Although Twitter data do not seem to be useful for quantitative research evaluation, it seems that Twitter data can be used in a more qualitative way for mapping of public and scientific discourses.
Originality/value
This study explores a rather new methodology for comparing public and scientific discourses.