Abstract
This paper investigates how and why scientific video articles are communicated on Twitter. We use video articles published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) as our objects of study. We harvested tweets from October 2011 to November 2015 that contained one or more JoVE links. These tweets “citing” JoVE articles were analyzed both statistically and qualitatively. In this paper, we present the distribution of these tweets, with a closer look at the affordance use of Twitter including hashtags and mentions. In addition, we conducted a content analysis of the sampled Twitter accounts and tweets. We present the coding schemes and results of both Twitter user accounts and tweets text. In addition to the analysis of the coding results, we discuss the content of the tweets with particular attention to issues including the video/visual feature mentioned, the role of Twitter bots, and self-promotion of different stakeholders in the Twitter communication of JoVE video publications.
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Acknowledgements
The present study is an extended version of an article (Xu et al. 2017) presented at the 16th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, Wuhan (China), 16–20 October 2017. The authors would like to thank Altmetric.com for supplying the data and its descriptions for our study. The authors would like to thank Huan Lian for helping with the initial step of the content analysis. The authors would like to thank Debbie Maron, Austin Ward, and Sandeep Avula for providing suggestions in writing the paper. The authors would like to thank the reviewers of this article for their valuable suggestions.
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Xu, S., Yu, H., Hemminger, B.M. et al. Who, what, why? An exploration of JoVE scientific video publications in tweets. Scientometrics 117, 845–856 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2880-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2880-x