Tweets on Academic Papers ‘Mechanical and Devoid of Original Thought’

Posted September 2, 2017

External Article: Times Higher Education

Research by a Georgia Tech team led by Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, a postdoctoral researcher in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, was featured in the article “Tweets on Academic Papers ‘Mechanical and Devoid of Original Thought’” in The Times Higher Education, September 2. The team examined the content of 8,200 tweets from 2,200 U.S,-based Twitter accounts on the subject of 4,350 dental research papers.

Excerpt:

But so far little research has looked at whether tweet counts can act as a measure of engagement with scientific literature. So a group of researchers led by Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, looked at the content of 8,200 tweets from 2,200 U.S.-based Twitter accounts on the subject of 4,350 dental research papers.

They found that the most tweeted paper, about acetaminophen (paracetamol), accumulated 264 tweets, putting it in the top 5 percent of research outputs scored by Altmetric. The researchers found that almost 75 percent of the tweets came from the same account, which linked to the paper 65 times in a repeated tweet that said just “paracetamol research” and a further 33 times in another tweet that offered just repetitions of the same wording referring to the safety of acetaminophen in pregnancy.

The full article on “Tweets on Academic Papers ‘Mechanical and Devoid of Original Thought’” can be found on the Times Higher Education website.”