1. Approaches to Analyzing Scientific
Communication on Twitter
A project of the researchers group „Science and the Internet“
Katrin Weller & Cornelius Puschmann
Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf
The World According to Twitter workshop.
Brisbane, Australia. June 28, 2011.
Slides are online: http://www.slideshare.net/katrinweller

2. Background: Science and the Internet
6 projects
8 persons
5 disciplines
1 overall topic
NFGWIN
http://nfgwin.uni-
duesseldorf.de/en/node

3. Background: Science and the Internet
The projects
Digital genres of Law and scientific
publication Educational beliefs internet usage
Change of the
“Publication” concept Citations in Web 2.0 3D environments

4. Background: Science and the Internet
Current activities
Doctoral class Media trainings
Courses
Guest for
lectures academic
staff
Conference Work across subprojects
September Scientific
2012, Twitter
Düsseldorf usage

5. Background: Science and the Internet
Current activities
HHU-QUT exchange

6. Scientific Microblogging?
How can scientific tweets be identified?
Based on content
Based on persons
Based on formats

7. Analyzing Conference Tweets
• Selection of conferences
Data • Collection of tweets based on
Collection conference hashtags
• Time series
Automatic • Most active users
Analysis • User-networks
• Categorization of tweet contents
Manual • Key question: Are tweets dealing with
Analysis the scientific topics of a conference?
• URLs in tweets („external citations“)
Citation • Retweets („internal citations“)
Analysis

8. Data Collection

9. Automatic Analysis

10. Number of tweets per hour
hour
Time Series: #mla09

11. User Network based on RTs: #mla09

12. Retweet-Networks over Time
Data from Digital Humanities Conference 2010 (7-10 July 2010), Source:: Puschmann, C., Weller, K., & Dröge, E. (2011). Studying Twitter
conversations as (dynamic) graphs: visualization and structural comparison. Presented at General Online Research, 14-16 March 2011,
Düsseldorf, Germany. Retrieved from http://ynada.com/posters/gor11.pdf.

13. Number of tweets
20
40
60
80
0
140
160
100
120
samplereality
mlaconvention
briancroxall
kfitz
MLAdeconvention
triproftri
amandafrench
jcmeloni
nowviskie
User Activities: #mla09
academicdave
NewFacMajority
JenHoward
ryancordell
amandalicastro
wpwend42
amndw2
georgeonline
eetempleton
mkirschenbaum
spikenlilli
annecmccarthy
ericganderson
warnick
alogemann
derekbruff
christydena
EMiC_project
profsyn
kwissoker
lizlosh
mini_mia
mkgold

14. User Activities: #mla09
40
Number of @-messages
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
@-messages sent
@-Nachrichten gesendet @-Nachrichtenreceived
@-messages empfangen

15. Manual Analysis

16. Categorization Scheme for Tweet Contents
1. Level: Content 2. Level: Purpose
1.1 Related to scientific 2.1 Communication with
topics of conference [YES] others [COM]
1.2 Not related to scientific 2.2 Conference-related
topics of conference [NO] tweets [CONF]
2.3 Self-referential tweets
1.3 undefined [NA]
[ME]
2.4 Media-sharing [URL]
2.5 undefined [NA]
RTs excluded

17. Tweet Contents
Are tweets dealing with the scientific topics
of the conference? (RTs excluded)
2500
keineavailable
Not Angabe Nein
No Ja
Yes
Number of tweets
2000 155
1500
105 938
1000
1.002
500 953
308
0
#mla09
#mla09 #www2010
#www2010

18. Tweet Contents
Purposes of tweets (multiple categories per tweet)
60
Percentage of tweets (RTs excluded)
53,8 %
50
#www2010
40 #mla09
30,9 % 31
30
%
27 % 27,3 %
21
20 % 17,8
15,5 % % 15,4 %
1098
382
10
439
386
630
220
428
364
5%
218
101
0
CONF URL COM ME NA

19. Citation Analysis on Twitter

20. Citations and References
• Document A cites Document B = A includes a reference to B.
• There is an information flow from B to A.
• Document B receives a citation (and thus reputation).
Citing Cited
Document A Document B
As pointed out by Reputation
B, everything will „Everything will
be allright. be allright!“
Information
Reference: see
Document B.

21. Citations and References on Twitter?

22. External and Internal Citations

23. Overlap of External and Internal Citations

24. Overlap of External and Internal Citations

25. What is Highly Cited?

26. What is Highly Cited?

27. URL Categories: #www2010

28. URL Categories: #mla09

29. Future Work
Inclusion of additional conferences,
comparision of disciplines
More detailed analysis of datasets
based on people
Identification of „user types“
Longitudinal study: Usage patterns
over time

30. Greetings from Düsseldorf!
Dr. Katrin Weller Dr. Cornelius Puschmann
Dept. of Information Science Dept. of English Language and Linguistics
Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf
Universitätsstr. 1, Geb. 23.21.04.68, Universitätsstr. 1, Geb. 23.11.01.21
D-40225 Düsseldorf D-40225 Düsseldorf
E-Mail: weller@uni-duesseldorf.de E-Mail: cornelius.puschmann@uni-
duesseldorf.de
Twitter: @kwelle Twitter: @coffee001
Acknowledgements:
@knuurps @free5pirit @ParrPar
#nfgwin #iwhhu Evelyn Julia Parinaz
Dröge Verbina Maghferat

31. Further Reading
• Weller, K., & Puschmann, P. (2011, in press). Twitter for Scientific Communication: How Can
Citations/References be Identified and Measured? To appear in: Proceedings of the Poster
Session at the Web Science Conference 2011, Koblenz, Germany.
Preprint: http://www.websci11.org/fileadmin/websci/Posters/153_paper.pdf
• Weller, K., Dröge, E., & Puschmann, C. (2011). Citation Analysis in Twitter: Approaches for
Defining and Measuring Information Flows within Tweets during Scientific Conferences. In
Matthew Rowe, Milan Stankovic, Aba-Sah Dadzie, & Mariann Hardey (Eds.), Making Sense of
Microposts (#MSM2011), Workshop at Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011), Crete,
Greece (pp. 1-12). CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol. 718. http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-
aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-718/
• Puschmann, C., Weller, K., & Dröge, E. (2011). Studying Twitter conversations as (dynamic)
graphs: Visualization and structural comparison. Poster presented at General Online Research
(GOR 11), 14-16 March 2011, Düsseldorf, Germany. Retrieved from
http://ynada.com/posters/gor11.pdf.
• Dröge, E., Maghferat, P., Puschmann, C., Verbina, J., & Weller, K. (2011). Konferenz-Tweets. Ein
Ansatz zur Analyse der Twitter-Kommunikation bei wissenschaftlichen Konferenzen. In Joachim
Griesbaum, Thomas Mandl, Christa Womser-Hacker (Eds.), Information und Wissen: global, sozial
und frei? Proceedings des 12. Internationalen Symposiums für Informationswissenchaft (pp. 98-
110). Boizenburg: VWH.

32. Selected References
• Boyd, D., Golder, S., Lotan, G.: Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of
retweeting on Twitter. In R. H. Sprague (Ed.), Proceedings of the 43rd Conference on
System Sciences (HICSS 10), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE (2010)
• Ebner, M., & Reinhardt, W. (2009). Social networking in scientific conferences: Twitter
as tool for strengthen a scientific community. In U. Cress; V. Dimitrova, & M. Specht
(Eds.), Learning in the Synergy of Multiple Disciplines.4th European Conference on
Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2009 Nice, France. Berlin: Springer.
• Letierce, J., Passant, A., Decker, S., & Breslin, J. G. (2010). Understanding how Twitter
is used to spread scientific messages. In Proceedings of the Web Science Conference
(WebSci10): Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, Raleigh, NC, USA.
• Priem, J., & Costello, K. L. (2010). How and why scholars cite on Twitter. In C.
Marshall; E. Toms, & A. Grove (Eds.), Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting
on Navigating Streams in an Information Ecosystem, Pittsburgh, PA, USA (pp. Article
No. 75). New York, NY: ACM.
• Ross, C., Terras, M., Warwick, C., & Welsh, A. (2011). Enabled backchannel:
Conference Twitter use by digital humanists. Journal of Documentation, 67(2), 214–
237.

33. Sources for images
Page 3:
Second Life: http://www.beekeepergroup.com/is-second-life-relevant/
“Blog” keyboard: http://www.timelesswebs.com/make-money-blog-money-blog/
Wikipedia citations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brisbane
Page 4 (media trainings), pages 6, 9, 15, 19, 29: Microsoft ClipArt.
Photos from Düsseldorf / Brisbane (pages 4,5, 30) by Katrin Weller.