User Engagement with Scholarly Twitter Mentions: A Large-scale and Cross-disciplinary Analysis

This study investigates the extent to which scholarly Twitter mentions of scientific papers are engaged with by Twitter users through four types of user engagement behaviors, i.e., liking, retweeting, replying, and quoting. On the basis of a dataset consisting of nearly 8.7 million scholarly Twitter mentions, our results show that there are 55.4% of them have been engaged with by Twitter users through at least one engagement behavior, whereas the remaining did not attract any user engagement. Liking and retweeting are the most common user engagement behaviors. From the disciplinary perspective, scholarly Twitter mentions pertaining to Social Sciences and Humanities are more likely to trigger user engagement. Twitter engagement indicators (i.e., likes, retweets, replies, and quotes) are moderately or strongly correlated with each other, but are weakly correlated with scholarly impact indicators (i.e., citations and Mendeley readers). The analysis of user engagement uncovers the impact of scholarly Twitter mentions on the Twitter universe, shedding light on the characterization of deeper levels of Twitter reception of science information.