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User Motivations for Tweeting Research Articles: A Content Analysis Approach

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Digital Libraries: Providing Quality Information (ICADL 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9469))

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Abstract

Nowadays Twitter is used to disseminate scientific findings to the general public, and how often research articles are tweeted is a major metric in altmetrics. So it is important to understand tweet authors’ citation motivations and attitudes (or sentiments) towards the articles they cite. A content analysis approach was used to analyze 2,016 English tweets citing academic papers in the field of psychology. The results showed that most tweets (52.88%) cited articles to summarize the scientific findings of the studies. 11.81% of the tweets contained only the titles and URLs of the articles, and 19.05% of the tweets were retweets. Most tweeters held a neutral attitude towards the articles they tweeted, and only 5.15% showed negative feeling. In summary, most of the tweets do not convey in-depth critical discussion of academic papers, but they provide good access to some interesting research findings.

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Correspondence to Jin-Cheon Na .

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Na, JC. (2015). User Motivations for Tweeting Research Articles: A Content Analysis Approach. In: Allen, R., Hunter, J., Zeng, M. (eds) Digital Libraries: Providing Quality Information. ICADL 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9469. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27974-9_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27974-9_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27973-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27974-9

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