IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/infome/v12y2018i3p605-617.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is there Lingua Franca in informal scientific communication? Evidence from language distribution of scientific tweets

Author

Listed:
  • Yu, Houqiang
  • Xu, Shenmeng
  • Xiao, Tingting

Abstract

Language distribution in scientific communication reflects the influence of different languages on science in global perspective. The study, based on over 450 thousand scientific tweets of all publications indexed by Scopus in June 2015, reveals the language distribution in informal scientific communication. Moreover, this result is compared with the language distribution in formal scientific communication reflected in scientific publications. Results show: (1) The language of scientific tweets is concentrated in English (91%), Japanese (2.4%) and Spanish (1.7%), while the language of scientific publications is concentrated in English (90.6%), Chinese (5%) and German (1.1%). (2) Both scientific tweets and scientific publications present disciplinary differences in language distribution, reflecting the different amount of attention that authors of different languages have on certain disciplines. (3) Except Saudi Arabia, investigated countries all over the world, regardless of whether their native language is English or not, all have English scientific tweets in the dominant position. For the vast majority of these countries, the native language scientific tweets only rank the second position. (4) Overall, 26% of tweeters use more than one language to tweet scientific products, while 49% of scientific tweeters tweet everything in English only. The results indicate that English has undoubtedly become the lingua franca in informal scientific communication.

Suggested Citation

  • Yu, Houqiang & Xu, Shenmeng & Xiao, Tingting, 2018. "Is there Lingua Franca in informal scientific communication? Evidence from language distribution of scientific tweets," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 605-617.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:12:y:2018:i:3:p:605-617
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2018.06.003
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175115771730442X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.joi.2018.06.003?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Houqiang Yu, 2017. "Context of altmetrics data matters: an investigation of count type and user category," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 111(1), pages 267-283, April.
    2. Kim Holmberg & Mike Thelwall, 2014. "Disciplinary differences in Twitter scholarly communication," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1027-1042, November.
    3. Franceschini, Fiorenzo & Maisano, Domenico & Mastrogiacomo, Luca, 2016. "The museum of errors/horrors in Scopus," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 174-182.
    4. Hendrik P. Van Dalen & Kène Henkens, 2001. "What makes a scientific article influential? The case of demographers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 50(3), pages 455-482, March.
    5. Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Sam Work & Vincent Larivière & Stefanie Haustein, 2017. "Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 68(9), pages 2037-2062, September.
    6. Yu, Houqiang & Xu, Shenmeng & Xiao, Tingting & Hemminger, Brad M. & Yang, Siluo, 2017. "Global science discussed in local altmetrics: Weibo and its comparison with Twitter," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 466-482.
    7. Declan Butler, 2000. "French scientists turn to journals in English," Nature, Nature, vol. 405(6786), pages 500-500, June.
    8. Richard Van Noorden, 2014. "Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network," Nature, Nature, vol. 512(7513), pages 126-129, August.
    9. Stefanie Haustein & Isabella Peters & Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Mike Thelwall & Vincent Larivière, 2014. "Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 65(4), pages 656-669, April.
    10. Julia Vainio & Kim Holmberg, 2017. "Highly tweeted science articles: who tweets them? An analysis of Twitter user profile descriptions," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(1), pages 345-366, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Houqiang Yu & Yue Wang & Shah Hussain & Haoyang Song, 2023. "Towards a better understanding of Facebook Altmetrics in LIS field: assessing the characteristics of involved paper, user and post," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(5), pages 3147-3170, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Yu, Houqiang & Xiao, Tingting & Xu, Shenmeng & Wang, Yuefen, 2019. "Who posts scientific tweets? An investigation into the productivity, locations, and identities of scientific tweeters," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 841-855.
    2. Shenmeng Xu & Houqiang Yu & Bradley M. Hemminger & Xie Dong, 2018. "Who, what, why? An exploration of JoVE scientific video publications in tweets," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 117(2), pages 845-856, November.
    3. Zhichao Fang & Rodrigo Costas & Paul Wouters, 2022. "User engagement with scholarly tweets of scientific papers: a large-scale and cross-disciplinary analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(8), pages 4523-4546, August.
    4. Yaxue Ma & Zhichao Ba & Yuxiang Zhao & Jin Mao & Gang Li, 2021. "Understanding and predicting the dissemination of scientific papers on social media: a two-step simultaneous equation modeling–artificial neural network approach," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(8), pages 7051-7085, August.
    5. Lutz Bornmann & Robin Haunschild & Vanash M Patel, 2020. "Are papers addressing certain diseases perceived where these diseases are prevalent? The proposal to use Twitter data as social-spatial sensors," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(11), pages 1-22, November.
    6. Bornmann, Lutz & Haunschild, Robin & Adams, Jonathan, 2019. "Do altmetrics assess societal impact in a comparable way to case studies? An empirical test of the convergent validity of altmetrics based on data from the UK research excellence framework (REF)," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 325-340.
    7. Jianhua Hou & Jiantao Ye, 2020. "Are uncited papers necessarily all nonimpact papers? A quantitative analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(2), pages 1631-1662, August.
    8. Yingxin Estella Ye & Jin-Cheon Na & Poong Oh, 2022. "Are automated accounts driving scholarly communication on Twitter? a case study of dissemination of COVID-19 publications," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(5), pages 2151-2172, May.
    9. Saeed-Ul Hassan & Mubashir Imran & Uzair Gillani & Naif Radi Aljohani & Timothy D. Bowman & Fereshteh Didegah, 2017. "Measuring social media activity of scientific literature: an exhaustive comparison of scopus and novel altmetrics big data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(2), pages 1037-1057, November.
    10. J. C. F. Winter, 2015. "The relationship between tweets, citations, and article views for PLOS ONE articles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(2), pages 1773-1779, February.
    11. Hou, Jianhua & Wang, Yuanyuan & Zhang, Yang & Wang, Dongyi, 2022. "How do scholars and non-scholars participate in dataset dissemination on Twitter," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(1).
    12. Didegah, Fereshteh & Mejlgaard, Niels & Sørensen, Mads P., 2018. "Investigating the quality of interactions and public engagement around scientific papers on Twitter," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 960-971.
    13. Xi Zhang & Xianhai Wang & Hongke Zhao & Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos & Yongqiang Sun & Hui Xiong, 2019. "An effectiveness analysis of altmetrics indices for different levels of artificial intelligence publications," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(3), pages 1311-1344, June.
    14. Mazarakis, Athanasios & Peters, Isabella, 2015. "Quo Vadis German Scholarly Communication in Economics?," EconStor Conference Papers 110679, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    15. Sergio Copiello, 2019. "Research Interest: another undisclosed (and redundant) algorithm by ResearchGate," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(1), pages 351-360, July.
    16. Chieh Liu & Mu-Hsuan Huang, 2022. "Exploring the relationships between altmetric counts and citations of papers in different academic fields based on co-occurrence analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(8), pages 4939-4958, August.
    17. Houqiang Yu, 2017. "Context of altmetrics data matters: an investigation of count type and user category," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 111(1), pages 267-283, April.
    18. Siluo Yang & Xin Xing & Fan Qi & Maria Cláudia Cabrini Grácio, 2021. "Comparison of academic book impact from a disciplinary perspective: an analysis of citations and altmetric indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(2), pages 1101-1123, February.
    19. Liwei Zhang & Jue Wang, 2021. "What affects publications’ popularity on Twitter?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(11), pages 9185-9198, November.
    20. Martín-Martín, Alberto & Orduna-Malea, Enrique & Delgado López-Cózar, Emilio, 2018. "Author-level metrics in the new academic profile platforms: The online behaviour of the Bibliometrics community," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(2), pages 494-509.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:12:y:2018:i:3:p:605-617. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/joi .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.