IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/infome/v15y2021i3s1751157721000419.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

‘To tweet or not to tweet?’ A study of the use of Twitter by scholarly book publishers in Social Sciences and Humanities

Author

Listed:
  • Wang, Yajie
  • Hou, Haiyan
  • Hu, Zhigang

Abstract

Publishers might believe the use of Twitter will help promote their scholarly books. In this study, we analyzed 18,691 books indexed by the Book Citation Index (BKCI) in the Social Sciences and Humanities, published between 2014 and 2018, and proposed two indicators describing the Twitter engagement of publishers: relative coverage and relative receptivity. The results show significant disciplinary and year differences in publishers’ Twitter engagement For instance, in all 10 disciplines, small and medium-sized publishers generally prefer to promote their books (high relative coverage) on Twitter, but the majority of publishers have low relative coverage in these 5 years. In addition, results show that books mentioned by their publishers’ Twitter accounts get significantly higher Twitter mentions (high relative receptivity) as compared to books mentioned by non-publisher’ Twitter accounts. The results suggest that scholarly book publishers should engage in social media activity to increase Twitter mentions and visibility of their books.

Suggested Citation

  • Wang, Yajie & Hou, Haiyan & Hu, Zhigang, 2021. "‘To tweet or not to tweet?’ A study of the use of Twitter by scholarly book publishers in Social Sciences and Humanities," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:15:y:2021:i:3:s1751157721000419
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2021.101170
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157721000419
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.joi.2021.101170?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. Ronald Snijder, 2016. "Revisiting an open access monograph experiment: measuring citations and tweets 5 years later," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 1855-1875, December.
    2. Mousumi Karmakar & Sumit Kumar Banshal & Vivek Kumar Singh, 2020. "Does presence of social media plugins in a journal website result in higher social media attention of its research publications?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(3), pages 2103-2143, September.
    3. Alesia Zuccala & Raf Guns & Roberto Cornacchia & Rens Bod, 2015. "Can we rank scholarly book publishers? A bibliometric experiment with the field of history," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(7), pages 1333-1347, July.
    4. Han Zheng & Htet Htet Aung & Mojisola Erdt & Tai‐Quan Peng & Aravind Sesagiri Raamkumar & Yin‐Leng Theng, 2019. "Social media presence of scholarly journals," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 70(3), pages 256-270, March.
    5. 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.
    6. Elea Giménez-Toledo & Jorge Mañana-Rodríguez & Tim C. E. Engels & Peter Ingwersen & Janne Pölönen & Gunnar Sivertsen & Frederik T. Verleysen & Alesia A. Zuccala, 2016. "Taking scholarly books into account: current developments in five European countries," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 107(2), pages 685-699, May.
    7. 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.
    8. Pardeep Sud & Mike Thelwall, 2014. "Evaluating altmetrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(2), pages 1131-1143, February.
    9. Kortelainen, Terttu & Katvala, Mari, 2012. "“Everything is plentiful—Except attention”. Attention data of scientific journals on social web tools," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(4), pages 661-668.
    10. 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.
    11. Rodrigo Costas & Zohreh Zahedi & Paul Wouters, 2015. "Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(10), pages 2003-2019, October.
    12. Thor, Andreas & Marx, Werner & Leydesdorff, Loet & Bornmann, Lutz, 2016. "Introducing CitedReferencesExplorer (CRExplorer): A program for reference publication year spectroscopy with cited references standardization," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 503-515.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. 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.
    2. Ting Cong & Zhichao Fang & Rodrigo Costas, 2022. "WeChat uptake of chinese scholarly journals: an analysis of CSSCI-indexed journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(12), pages 7091-7110, December.
    3. Saeed-Ul Hassan & Timothy D. Bowman & Mudassir Shabbir & Aqsa Akhtar & Mubashir Imran & Naif Radi Aljohani, 2019. "Influential tweeters in relation to highly cited articles in altmetric big data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(1), pages 481-493, April.
    4. 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.
    5. Ying Guo & Xiantao Xiao, 2022. "Author-level altmetrics for the evaluation of Chinese scholars," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(2), pages 973-990, February.
    6. Solanki Gupta & Vivek Kumar Singh & Sumit Kumar Banshal, 2024. "Altmetric data quality analysis using Benford’s law," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(7), pages 4597-4621, July.
    7. 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.
    8. Yajie Wang & Alesia Zuccala, 2021. "Scholarly book publishers as publicity agents for SSH titles on Twitter," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(6), pages 4817-4840, June.
    9. Yang, Siluo & Zheng, Mengxue & Yu, Yonghao & Wolfram, Dietmar, 2021. "Are Altmetric.com scores effective for research impact evaluation in the social sciences and humanities?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(1).
    10. Daniel Torres-Salinas & Nicolás Robinson-Garcia & Juan Gorraiz, 2017. "Filling the citation gap: measuring the multidimensional impact of the academic book at institutional level with PlumX," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(3), pages 1371-1384, December.
    11. 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.
    12. 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.
    13. Zhichao Fang & Rodrigo Costas & Wencan Tian & Xianwen Wang & Paul Wouters, 2020. "An extensive analysis of the presence of altmetric data for Web of Science publications across subject fields and research topics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(3), pages 2519-2549, September.
    14. Hou, Jianhua & Yang, Xiucai, 2020. "Social media-based sleeping beauties: Defining, identifying and features," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(2).
    15. Tan Jin & Huiqiong Duan & Xiaofei Lu & Jing Ni & Kai Guo, 2021. "Do research articles with more readable abstracts receive higher online attention? Evidence from Science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(10), pages 8471-8490, October.
    16. Hajar Sotudeh & Zeinab Saber & Farzin Ghanbari Aloni & Mahdieh Mirzabeigi & Farshad Khunjush, 2022. "A longitudinal study of the evolution of opinions about open access and its main features: a twitter sentiment analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(10), pages 5587-5611, October.
    17. Jyoti Paswan & Vivek Kumar Singh & Mousumi Karmakar & Prashasti Singh, 2022. "Does university–industry–government collaboration in research gets higher citation and altmetric impact? A case study from India," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(11), pages 6063-6082, November.
    18. Sergio Copiello, 2020. "Other than detecting impact in advance, alternative metrics could act as early warning signs of retractions: tentative findings of a study into the papers retracted by PLoS ONE," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2449-2469, December.
    19. Iraklis Varlamis & Dimitrios Michail & Foteini Glykou & Panagiotis Tsantilas, 2022. "A Survey on the Use of Graph Convolutional Networks for Combating Fake News," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 14(3), pages 1-19, February.
    20. Wang, Zhiqi & Chen, Yue & Glänzel, Wolfgang, 2020. "Preprints as accelerator of scholarly communication: An empirical analysis in Mathematics," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).

    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:15:y:2021:i:3:s1751157721000419. 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.