A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

Who are tweeting about academic publications? A systematic review and meta-analysis of altmetric studies;




AuthorsMaleki, Ashraf; Holmberg, Kim

PublisherMIT Press

Publication year2026

Journal: Quantitative science studies

Volume7

First page 485

Last page520

eISSN2641-3337

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1162/QSS.a.464

Publication's open availability at the time of reportingOpen Access

Publication channel's open availability Open Access publication channel

Web address https://doi.org/10.1162/qss.a.464

Self-archived copy’s web addresshttps://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/526592402

Self-archived copy's licenceCC BY

Self-archived copy's versionPublisher`s PDF


Abstract

Understanding who shares academic publications on Twitter is critical to interpretingaltmetrics as signals of scholarly or societal impact. Prior studies have used diverse and oftenincompatible user classification schemes, making synthesis difficult. This study presents asystematic review and meta-analysis of 23 empirical studies (covering 79,014 Twitter users,over 20 million tweets, and more than 5 million tweeted publications) to estimate category-specific engagement across three metrics: user counts, tweets, and tweeted publications. Wedeveloped a harmonized categorization scheme encompassing 11 user types and applied bothrandom effects models (REM) and beta-binomial hierarchical models (BBHM) to estimateproportions, account for study-level variation, and model uncertainty. Across all indicators,individual users were the most active, comprising 66% of users, 55% of tweets, and 50% oftweeted publications. BBHM further enabled in-category vs. out-of-category comparisons andrevealed engagement differences not detected by REM.t-tests on study-level means confirmedsignificant differences between academic individuals and other user types. Despitemethodological heterogeneity, results consistently show that academic and nonacademicindividuals statistically equally dominate Twitter engagement with scholarly content. Ourfindings support the need for standardized user classification schemes and demonstrate thevalue of Bayesian modeling for synthesizing altmetric data in study variation and sparsity.



Keywords:
Altmetricsscholarly communicationsuser categorizationX/Twitter

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Funding information in the publication
This study is part of the research project"Applicability of altmetrics in research impact assess-ment", funded by the Academy of Finland (332961), currently known as the Research Councilof Finland.


Last updated on 20/07/2026 12:38:04 PM