Burst diffusion of highly retweeted scholarly articles in Social Media

In this study, we aim to explore the social media diffusing mechanism of highly retweeted scholarly articles. Employing the altmetric.com dataset, we examine the tweets of highly retweeted research articles. We detected the obvious burst phenomenon in the social media diffusion of highly retweeted articles. The burst accumulates rapidly, but the recession is also fast. The duration of the burst is about 20 hours, and the diffusion scale is 25-1000. For the sample paper of this study, it occupies more than 60% of the total dissemination volume, even up to 100%. We found that medical articles are absolute hot spots on twitter and highly-tweeted papers are usually topics of interest to both the general public and scientific audience. The result of topological analysis shows that the retweet networks have a limited height but a wide range of widths which is a kind of very typical mass communication, rather than interpersonal communication.