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Whose research benefits more from Twitter? On Twitter-worthiness of communication research and its role in reinforcing disparities of the field.

ABSTRACT: Twitter has become an important promotional tool for scholarly work, but individual academic publications have varied degrees of visibility on the platform. We explain this variation through the concept of Twitter-worthiness: factors making certain academic publications more likely to be visible on Twitter. Using publications from communication studies as our analytical case, we conduct statistical analyses of 32187 articles spanning 82 journals. Findings show that publications from G12 countries, covering social media topics and published open access tend to be mentioned more on Twitter. Similar to prior studies, this study demonstrates that Twitter mentions are associated with peer citations. Nevertheless, Twitter also has the potential to reinforce pre-existing disparities between communication research communities, especially between researchers from developed and less-developed regions. Open access, however, does not reinforce such disparities.

SUBMITTER: Chan CH

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10045544 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Whose research benefits more from Twitter? On Twitter-worthiness of communication research and its role in reinforcing disparities of the field.

Chan Chung-Hong CH Zeng Jing J Schäfer Mike S MS

PloS one 20221212 12

Twitter has become an important promotional tool for scholarly work, but individual academic publications have varied degrees of visibility on the platform. We explain this variation through the concept of Twitter-worthiness: factors making certain academic publications more likely to be visible on Twitter. Using publications from communication studies as our analytical case, we conduct statistical analyses of 32187 articles spanning 82 journals. Findings show that publications from G12 countrie ...[more]

PMID: 36508423

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Whose research benefits more from Twitter? On Twitter-worthiness of communication research and its role in reinforcing disparities of the field.

Publications

Whose research benefits more from Twitter? On Twitter-worthiness of communication research and its role in reinforcing disparities of the field.

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