Shen, Yan; Dudek, Jonathan; Costas, Rodrigo
Funded by China Scholarship Council
Academic discussions on Twitter have increased over the past decade. This study analyzes ca. 1.3 million scholarly conversations on Twitter, examining their temporal evolution, topical distribution, and associated publications. The results show a steady growth in the number of scholarly conversations, accompanied by rising proportions of longer and multi‐topic conversations. The visibility of different disciplines and topics varies significantly, with popular themes often closely related to societal events. By comparing topic co‐occurrence networks in Twitter conversations with co‐citation networks in scholarly literature, the study reveals both commonalities and differences in topic structures across academic and non‐academic communication contexts. Moreover, publications that appear in multiple conversations are associated with higher citation counts, suggesting a potential link between conversational engagement and scholarly impact. These findings highlight that the feature of conversations on social media has value not only for refining indicators of scholarly attention and influence beyond simple mention counts, but also to capture more broadly how research is disseminated online.
