Social Media – DigitalKoans

"Tweeting and Retweeting Scientific Articles: Implications for Altmetrics"

Despite differences in extent of engagement of users, original tweets and retweets to scientific publications are considered as equal events. Current research investigates quantifiable differences between tweets and retweets from an altmetric point of view. Twitter users, text, and media content of two datasets, one containing 742 randomly selected tweets and retweets (371 each) and another with 5898 tweets and retweets (about 3000 each), all linking to scientific articles published on PLoS ONE, were manually categorized. Results from analyzing the proportions of tweets and retweets indicated that academic and individual accounts produce majority of original tweets (34% and 55%, respectively) and posted significantly larger proportion of retweets (41.5 and 81%). Bot accounts, on the other hand, had posted significantly more original tweets (20%) than retweets (2%). Natural communication sentences prevailed in retweets and tweets (63% vs. 45%) as well as images (41.5% vs. 23%), both showing a significant rise in usage overtime. Overall, the findings suggest that the attention scientific articles receive on Twitter may have more to do with human interaction and inclusion of visual content in the tweets, than the significance of or genuine interest towards the research results.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05127-8

"Trends in Information Behavior Research, 2016–2022: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology Paper"

Research on how people look for and interact with information has a long history in the information field. The current literature has been repeatedly reviewed in earlier volumes of Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. In this review, we offer an overview of the research published in this area in the years 2016–2022 with a focus on the trends that have emerged in this period. We use the term "information behavior" as an umbrella for the research area interested in how people become informed and engage with information in diverse manners acknowledging that different researchers and subfields prefer other terms and frameworks, including information practices, information experience, and health information seeking, to name a few. We reviewed 1270 articles in the field published in the years 2016–2022 and identified seven emerging trends: The CoVID-19 Pandemic, Diversity and Inclusion, Embodiment, Misinformation and Trust, Social Q&A Websites, Collaboration, and Information Creation. The reviewed literature and trends are discussed in relation to their significance for information, earlier review of information behavior research, and the long-debated issue of theory-driven versus atheoretical research in the field.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24943

Paywall: "Digital Curation Practices on Web and Social Media Archiving in Libraries and Archives"

Qualitative research was undertaken to explore the archiving practices through semi-structured interviews with 13 practitioners working in international libraries and archives at national and institutional levels across three continents. . . . Challenges were found in barriers to social media acquisition, lack of awareness, limited resources for preservation, uneven technical capacity, copyright and privacy concerns, and meeting user demands.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006241252661

"Effects of Research Paper Promotion via ArXiv and X"

In the evolving landscape of scientific publishing, it is important to understand the drivers of high-impact research, to equip scientists with actionable strategies to enhance the reach of their work, and to understand trends in the use of modern scientific publishing tools to inform their further development. Here, we study trends in the use of early preprint publications and revisions on ArXiv and the use of X (formerly Twitter) for promotion of such papers in computer science and physics. We find that early submissions to ArXiv and promotion on X have soared in recent years. Estimating the effect that the use of each of these modern affordances has on the number of citations of scientific publications, we find that peer-reviewed conference papers in computer science that are submitted early to ArXiv gain on average 21.1±17.4 more citations, revised on ArXiv gain 18.4±17.6 more citations, and promoted on X gain 44.4±8 more citations in the first 5 years from an initial publication. In contrast, journal articles in physics experience comparatively lower boosts in citation counts, with increases of 3.9±1.1, 4.3±0.9, and 6.9±3.5 citations respectively for the same interventions. Our results show that promoting one’s work on ArXiv or X has a large impact on the number of citations, as well as the number of influential citations computed by Semantic Scholar, and thereby on the career of researchers. These effects are present also for publications in physics, but they are relatively smaller. The larger relative effect sizes, effects of promotion accumulating over time, and elevated unpredictability of the number of citations in computer science than in physics suggest a greater role of world-of-mouth spreading in computer science than in physics.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11116v2

Paywall: "Social Media Archiving in Practice: A Troubled Landscape in Review"

This article looks at several notable examples of major social media data loss that have already taken place in recent history and examines one of the largest institutional attempts to preserve social media thus far in the Library of Congress’ Twitter Archive. By exploring some of the key challenges that arose during this attempt which ultimately grounded the project, this article aims to better understand what continues to keep the practice of social media archiving at bay, and what large scale changes might be necessary to make any further progress in the field.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2024.2367405

"Amplifying Academic Research through YouTube: Engagement Metrics as Predictors of Citation Impact"

The preliminary findings from the linear regression analysis (Table 1) suggest a meaningful relationship between the online engagement metrics of videos on YouTube and the academic impact of the publications referenced within these videos. Specifically, the analysis found positive correlations with the citation impact for three key metrics: the number of videos referencing publications, the ratio of likes to dislikes on videos, and the number of comments containing references to other publications. The positive correlation indicates a sort of selective amplification process. Publications mentioned in videos that garner attention in the form of likes and active discussion in comments are likely being selectively chosen for their relevance or quality. This selection process by content creators and the subsequent engagement by viewers may serve as an “informal peer review”, signaling the value and impact of the research. The findings suggest that social media, particularly YouTube in this context, acts as a filter that potentially can highlight the visibility of impactful research.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12734

"Controlled Experiment Finds No Detectable Citation Bump from Twitter Promotion"

Multiple studies across a variety of scientific disciplines have shown that the number of times that a paper is shared on Twitter (now called X) is correlated with the number of citations that paper receives. However, these studies were not designed to answer whether tweeting about scientific papers causes an increase in citations, or whether they were simply highlighting that some papers have higher relevance, importance or quality and are therefore both tweeted about more and cited more. The authors of this study are leading science communicators on Twitter from several life science disciplines, with substantially higher follower counts than the average scientist, making us uniquely placed to address this question. We conducted a three-year-long controlled experiment, randomly selecting five articles published in the same month and journal, and randomly tweeting one while retaining the others as controls. This process was repeated for 10 articles from each of 11 journals, recording Altmetric scores, number of tweets, and citation counts before and after tweeting. Randomization tests revealed that tweeted articles were downloaded 2.6–3.9 times more often than controls immediately after tweeting, and retained significantly higher Altmetric scores (+81%) and number of tweets (+105%) three years after tweeting. However, while some tweeted papers were cited more than their respective control papers published in the same journal and month, the overall increase in citation counts after three years (+7% for Web of Science and +12% for Google Scholar) was not statistically significant (p > 0.15). Therefore while discussing science on social media has many professional and societal benefits (and has been a lot of fun), increasing the citation rate of a scientist’s papers is likely not among them.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0292201

"Can ChatGPT Be Used to Predict Citation Counts, Readership, and Social Media Interaction? An Exploration among 2222 Scientific Abstracts"

This study explores the potential of ChatGPT, a large language model, in scientometrics by assessing its ability to predict citation counts, Mendeley readers, and social media engagement. In this study, 2222 abstracts from PLOS ONE articles published during the initial months of 2022 were analyzed using ChatGPT-4, which used a set of 60 criteria to assess each abstract. Using a principal component analysis, three components were identified: Quality and Reliability, Accessibility and Understandability, and Novelty and Engagement. The Accessibility and Understandability of the abstracts correlated with higher Mendeley readership, while Novelty and Engagement and Accessibility and Understandability were linked to citation counts (Dimensions, Scopus, Google Scholar) and social media attention. Quality and Reliability showed minimal correlation with citation and altmetrics outcomes. Finally, it was found that the predictive correlations of ChatGPT-based assessments surpassed traditional readability metrics. The findings highlight the potential of large language models in scientometrics and possibly pave the way for AI-assisted peer review.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04939-y

"Mastodon over Mammon: Towards Publicly Owned Scholarly Knowledge"

Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record—encompassing text, data and code—to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230207

Scholarly Podcasting Why, What, How?

Featuring interviews with 101 podcasting academics, including scholars and teachers of podcasting, this book explores the motivations of scholarly podcasters, interrogates what podcasting does to academic knowledge, and leads potential podcasters through the creation process from beginning to end. With scholarship often trapped inside expensive journals, wrapped in opaque language, and laced with a standoffish tone, this book analyses the implications of moving towards a more open and accessible form.

https://tinyurl.com/mr3b9bew

"Mastodon over Mammon — Towards Publicly Owned Scholarly Knowledge"

Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record — encompassing text, data and code — to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7643817

"Major YouTube Copyright Lawsuit Nears Trial With Almost Everything On the Line"

Maria Schneider’s lawsuit against YouTube alleges several types of mass copyright infringement and repeat infringer failures. The trial begins next month, with proposed jury instructions already running to 243 pages. YouTube believes it will win, but the stakes are rarely this high. In addition to damages, the plaintiffs want YouTube to disclose details of files that remain on the site after identical copies were removed due to DMCA notices. And that’s not all.

https://bit.ly/3pMnw9m

"Towards a Better Understanding of Facebook Altmetrics in LIS Field: Assessing the Characteristics of Involved Paper, User and Post"

These findings indicate that Facebook mentions to LIS papers mainly reflect the institutional level advocacy and attention, with low level of engagement, and could be influenced by several features including collaborative patterns and research topics.

https://doi.org/10.1145/2756406.2756913

"At Hearing, Judge Appears Skeptical of Internet Archive’s Scanning and Lending Program"

Over the course of a 90-minute hearing on the parties’ cross motions for summary judgment, Koeltl appeared skeptical that there was sufficient basis in law to support the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending of print library books under a legally untested protocol known as controlled digital lending, and unconvinced that the case is fundamentally about the future of library lending, as Internet Archive attorneys have argued.

http://bit.ly/3FFjVyS

"Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick, Slow: Five Altmetric Sources Observed over a Decade Show Evolving Trends, by Research Age, Attention Source Maturity and Open Access Status"

Twitter attention both starts and ends quickly. Mendeley readers accumulate quickly, and continue to grow over the following years. News and blog attention is quick to start, although news attention persists over a longer timeframe. Citations in policy documents are slow to start, and are observed to be growing over a decade after publication. Over time, growth in Twitter activity is confirmed, alongside an apparent decline in blogging attention. Mendeley usage is observed to grow, but shows signs of recent decline. Policy attention is identified as the slowest form of impact studied by altmetrics, and one that strongly favours the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Open Access Altmetrics Advantage is seen to emerge and evolve over time, with each attention source showing different trends.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04653-1

"Mastodon over Mammon — Towards Publicly Owned Scholarly Knowledge"

Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record —encompassing text, data and code —to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7643817

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"A Guide to Potential Liability Pitfalls for People Running a Mastodon Instance"

The absolute safest thing to do, to shield your own personal assets, is register a LLC (limited liability company), get a separate bank account in the name of the LLC, transfer any assets and liabilities (donations you receive / bills you pay) to the LLC, and get insurance in the name of the LLC. This is obviously complete overkill for anyone who’s running a really small server, especially because the annual fees for LLC registration are likely to exceed whatever amount your users chip in, but if you’re running an open-registration server or you exceed 20-30k users, or you have a lot of personal assets, you should think hard about it and talk to a lawyer.

https://cutt.ly/iM2aXNd

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Tumblr to Add Support for ActivityPub, the Social Protocol Powering Mastodon and Other Apps"

In practice, this means that Mastodon users can interact and follow users on other instances . . . . It makes for a web of social networks where users can find and follow each other without having to set up new accounts on each new service. . . . users on Mastodon could follow Tumblr users’ posts from their own Mastodon instance — without having to use the Tumblr app.

https://cutt.ly/tMBIadM

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Paywall — NYT Wirecutter: "Why Every Twitter User Should Archive and Lock Down Their Data"

Now is a good time to take steps to lock down your Twitter account, grab what data you can, review where you’re using Twitter to sign in to other online services, and delete anything you’d rather not live on a site that may be on its last legs. Taking these steps could protect you from identity theft or private messages being made public

https://cutt.ly/oMZDWod

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Is Mastodon Private and Secure? Let’s Take a Look"

For basic security, instances will employ transport-layer encryption, keeping your connection to the server you’ve chosen private. This will keep your communications safe from local eavesdroppers using your same WiFi connection, but it does not protect your communications, including your direct messages, from the server or instance you’ve chosen—or, if you’re messaging someone from a different instance, the server they’ve chosen. This includes the moderators and administrators of those instances, as well. Just like Twitter or Instagram, your posts and direct messages are accessible by those running the services. But unlike Twitter or Instagram, you have the choice in what server or instance you trust with your communications. . . . Two-factor authentication with an app or security key is available on Mastodon instances, giving users an extra security check to log on. The software also offers robust privacy controls: allowing users to set up automatic deletion of old posts, set personalized keyword filters, approve followers, and hide your social graph (the list of your followers and those you follow). Unfortunately, there is no analogue to making your account "private. . . . Mastodon users can mute, block, or report other users. Muting and blocking works just as you’d expect: it’s a list associated with your account that just stops the content of that user from appearing in your feed and prevents them from reaching out to you, respectively."

https://cutt.ly/mMZIEtS

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Requiem for a Tweet — Is There a Future for the Academic Social Capital Held on the Platform?"

The mechanisms through which this network status can be exchanged into academic advantage are not straightforward, but any academic who has achieved a degree of popularity online can attest to the direct and indirect advantages which this has brought to their career.. . . What if that capital is now worthless? It’s a strange position that has the potential to leave academics clinging on to their Twitter accounts long after the beneficial impact of the platform has evaporated in a mushroom cloud of moving fast and breaking things. The collapse of Twitter would be a significant event within higher education, analogous to (though not on the same scale as) citational rankings being reset overnight.

https://cutt.ly/VMZmyaA

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Twitter’s Potential Collapse Could Wipe Out Vast Records of Recent Human History"

Twitter’s ubiquity, its adoption by nearly a quarter of a billion users in the last 16 years, and its status as a de facto public archive, has made it a gold mine of information, says Thomas [senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue].

"In one sense, this actually represents an enormous opportunity for future historians—we’ve never had the capacity to capture this much data about any previous era in history," she explains. But that enormous scale presents a huge storage problem for organizations.

For eight years, the US Library of Congress took it upon itself to maintain a public record of all tweets, but it stopped in 2018, instead selecting only a small number of accounts’ posts to capture. "It never, ever worked," says William Kilbride, executive director of the Digital Preservation Coalition. The data the library was expected to store was too vast, the volume coming out of the firehose too great. "Let me put that in context: it’s the Library of Congress. They had some of the best expertise on this topic. If the Library of Congress can’t do it, that tells you something quite important," he says.

https://cutt.ly/EMPxp0h

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Gender and Country Biases in Wikipedia Citations to Scholarly Publications"

We investigate gender- and country-based biases in Wikipedia citation practices using linked data from the Web of Science and a Wikipedia citation dataset. . . . we show that publications by women are cited less by Wikipedia than expected, and publications by women are less likely to be cited than those by men. Scholarly publications by authors affiliated with non-Anglosphere countries are also disadvantaged in getting cited by Wikipedia. . . . The level of gender- or country-based inequalities varies by research field, and the gender-country intersectional bias is prominent in math-intensive STEM fields.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24723

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Humanities Commons Launches Mastodon Server Open to Scholars"

In response to community requests and our own recognition of the potential in this moment, we are launching hcommons.social, a Mastodon server open to all scholars (which we take to include: researchers, librarians, instructors, students, staff and anyone else with an active interest in research and education.) While we expect this space to lean Humanities-heavy, we leave it up to users whether it feels like the place they want to be. To start, there will be no limit on sign-ups, though we will review that policy over time as we learn more about the costs and overhead of managing the server.

https://cutt.ly/qN704oa

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Europe Prepares to Rewrite the Rules of the Internet"

Next week, a law takes effect that will change the internet forever—and make it much more difficult to be a tech giant. On November 1, the European Union’s Digital Markets Act comes into force, starting the clock on a process expected to force Amazon, Google, and Meta to make their platforms more open and interoperable in 2023. That could bring major changes to what people can do with their devices and apps, in a new reminder that Europe has regulated tech companies much more actively than the US.

https://cutt.ly/CNQPNS4

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |