Abstract
Counts of tweets mentioning research articles are potentially useful as social impact altmetric indicators, especially for health-related topics. One way to help understand what tweet counts indicate is to find factors that associate with the number of tweets received by articles. Using news value theory, this study examined six characteristics of research papers that may cause some articles to be more tweeted than others. For this, we manually coded 300 medical journal articles about COVID-19. A statistical analysis showed that all six factors that make articles more newsworthy according to news value theory (importance, controversy, elite nations, elite persons, scale, news prominence) associated with higher tweet counts. Since these factors are hypothesised to be general human news selection criteria, the results give new evidence that tweet counts may be indicators of general interest to members of society rather than measures of societal impact. This study also provides a new understanding of the strong positive relationship between news mentions and tweet counts for articles. Instead of news coverage attracting tweets or the other way round (journalists noticing highly tweeted articles and writing about them), the results are consistent with newsworthy characteristics of articles attracting both tweets and news mentions.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
Top institutions in medicine ranked by saliency (Microsoft Academic, 2021a).
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1.
Harvard University
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2.
Johns Hopkins University
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3.
National institutes of health
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4.
Mayo clinic
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5.
University of California San Francisco
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6.
University of Washington
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7.
Boston Children's Hospital
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8.
University of Michigan
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9.
Stanford University
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10.
Brigham and Women's Hospital
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11.
University of Toronto
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12.
University of Pennsylvania
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13.
University of California Los Angeles
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14.
University of Pittsburgh
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15.
Duke University
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16.
Yale University
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17.
Columbia University
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18.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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19.
Emory University
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20.
University College London
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21.
Washington University in St. Louis
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22.
University of Oxford
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23.
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
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24.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
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25.
Northwestern University
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26.
University of California San Diego
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27.
Cleveland Clinic
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28.
Imperial College London
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29.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
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30.
University of Minnesota
Appendix 2
Top institutions in Coronavirus research ranked by saliency (Microsoft Academic, 2021a).
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1.
Chinese Academy of Sciences
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2.
University of Hong Kong
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3.
Centers for disease control and prevention
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4.
Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital
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5.
Huazhong University of Science and Technology
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6.
Peking Union Medical College
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7.
Chinese center for disease control and prevention
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8.
Wuhan University
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9.
Tsinghua University
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10.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
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11.
Capital Medical University
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12.
Peking University
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13.
China-Japan Friendship Hospital
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14.
National Institutes of Health
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15.
Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine University of Hong Kong
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16.
World Health Organization
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17.
Erasmus University Rotterdam
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18.
Charité
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19.
Shandong University
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20.
University of Sydney
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21.
University of Washington
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22.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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23.
Harvard University
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24.
Fudan University
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25.
University of Oxford
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26.
University of Minnesota
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27.
Utrecht University
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28.
Pasteur Institute
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29.
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
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30.
University of California Los Angeles
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Htoo, T.H.H., Jin-Cheon, N. & Thelwall, M. Why are medical research articles tweeted? The news value perspective. Scientometrics 128, 207–226 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04578-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04578-1