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Characterization of the communities of attention interacting with scientific papers on Twitter: altmetric analysis of a Brazilian University

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Abstract

This paper aims to understand the communities of attention about science on Twitter. Papers published by researchers at the University of Brasília, shared on Twitter, were identified. The profile of Twitter users who published the articles were classified into: type of profile (personal, institutional and character), profile category (social, academic and professional), occupation, field of work, geographical and institutional links. The output data mentioned on Twitter were downloaded from the Altmetric platform, and 3653 tweets that mentioned 877 papers from University of Brasília (UnB) underwent analysis. The data from users’ accounts to identify their typologies were extracted from Twitter profiles, 2437 of which required manual categorization. Among the main results, we highlight the predominance of individuals’ accounts in relation to those of organizations, with strong participation of members of academia; however, predominance of society in general in the posts stood out, with a relatively high presence of users who declare themselves as from the United States, as well as users linked to academic institutions, and also greater engagement of professionals in the area of Health Sciences and Medicine.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the contributions of Dr. Rodrigo Costas Comesana, a CWTS researcher at the University of Leiden, during the course that included his participation at the University of Brasília in 2020.

Funding

The funding was provided by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Science, University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil

    João de Melo Maricato & Bruno Lara de Castro Manso

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  1. João de Melo Maricato
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  2. Bruno Lara de Castro Manso
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by both authors. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to João de Melo Maricato.

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de Melo Maricato, J., de Castro Manso, B.L. Characterization of the communities of attention interacting with scientific papers on Twitter: altmetric analysis of a Brazilian University. Scientometrics 127, 3815–3835 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04442-2

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