Pujari Subhash Chandra, Hadgu Asmelah Teka, Lex Elisabeth, Jäschke Robert
2015
Social Activity versus Academic Activity: A Case Study of Computer Scientists on Twitter
In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-Driven Business (i-KNOW 2015) ACM Graz, Austria
In this work, we study social and academic network activities
of researchers from Computer Science. Using a recently
proposed framework, we map the researchers to their Twitter
accounts and link them to their publications. This enables
us to create two types of networks: first, networks that
reflect social activities on Twitter, namely the researchers’
follow, retweet and mention networks and second, networks
that reflect academic activities, that is the co-authorship and
citation networks. Based on these datasets, we (i) compare
the social activities of researchers with their academic activities,
(ii) investigate the consistency and similarity of communities
within the social and academic activity networks,
and (iii) investigate the information flow between different
areas of Computer Science in and between both types of
networks. Our findings show that if co-authors interact on
Twitter, their relationship is reciprocal, increasing with the
numbers of papers they co-authored. In general, the social
and the academic activities are not correlated. In terms of
community analysis, we found that the three social activity
networks are most consistent with each other, with the
highest consistency between the retweet and mention network.
A study of information flow revealed that in the follow
network, researchers from Data Management, HumanComputer
Interaction, and Artificial Intelligence act as a
source of information for other areas in Computer Science.