What do computer scientists tweet? Analyzing the link-sharing practice on Twitter

Now online: What do computer scientists tweet? Analyzing the link-sharing practice on Twitter by Marco Schmitt and Robert Jäschke (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0179630).

In a study of the Twitter usage of more than 6000 computer scientists we found that computer scientists tweet less than the average Twitter user (72 vs. 175 median tweets per user) but more of their tweets contain links (40 vs. 26 median tweets with links per user). They are more active each day, with a distinctive difference between weekends and weekdays. In contrast to the average Twitter population, their most frequently tweeted links contain established newspapers (New York Times, Wired, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post) and domain-specific academic societies and publishers like CEUR-WS.org, AAAI, VLDB, Computer.org, ACM, and ACL are of specific importance for them. We found that most top publications that were tweeted quickly gained popularity, as evidenced by high citation counts. The publication with the highest relevance for computer scientists in 2014 is Repeatability and benefaction in computer systems research.