Influence of title characteristics in scientific literature on tweeting behaviour

Abstract

This study investigates the societal impact of Finnish arts and humanities research mentioned on the microblogging site Twitter. The impact is examined by analysing similarities between the titles of scientific articles and the contents of tweets. To establish a background for the study, different kinds of metrics for research evaluation are reviewed before discussing different aspects of science tweeting and features of academic titles such as length, type, and amusement. This study mainly uses exploratory methods and analyses Twitter data collected by the Research Unit for the Sociology of Education (RUSE) at the University of Turku. The results show a weak connection between the number of retweets and the level of lexical difficulty of scientific titles. In addition, more than half of the number of tweets include summaries of the titles or contain personal comments instead of only quoting the titles. Moreover, this study reveals that Finnish family matters represent the most popular topic in the interdisciplinary field of arts and humanities. In spite of limitations in methodology, this study concludes by the discussions including the implications, similarities as well as differences with previous studies, to present potential evidence for approaching advanced research of scholarly communication.