Understanding the dynamic process and determinants of scientific papers’ diffusion on social media

Ma, Yaxue; Ba, Zhichao; Li, Gang

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/109677 Copy

Description

Title

Understanding the dynamic process and determinants of scientific papers’ diffusion on social media

Author(s)

• Ma, Yaxue
• Ba, Zhichao
• Li, Gang

Issue Date

2021-03-17

Keyword(s)

• Scientific paper
• Diffusion process
• Influencing factor
• Social media
• Twitter

Abstract

Social media have gained enormous impacts on the diffusion of scientific work and fare well in covering scientific papers. However, little is known about the general diffusion process from academia to social media and how various factors affect the diffusion of scientific papers at different stages. In this paper, we proposed a two-staged diffusion process to profile the diffusion of scientific papers from academia to social media. The simultaneous equation model (3SLS) was adopted to explore the influence of source-related and content-related factors. The analysis in the field of Oncology suggests that most factors related to the information source play critical roles in promoting the diffusion of scientific papers. The number of first-generation tweets has the most remarkable impact on subsequent diffusion. As for the content-related factors, tweets attached with more URLs can provide richer information for audiences, thereby increasing the retweet scale of scientific papers. Besides, different research topics have diverse impacts on diffusion. The significant moderating effect of source-related factors between the content-related factors and the diffusion effects has been observed. The findings of this study contribute to the literature on the diffusion of scientific papers beyond academia and provide practical implications for scholarly communication.

Publisher

iSchools

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/109677

Sponsor(s)/Grant Number(s)

• the National Natural Science Foundation of China No. 71921002
• the National Natural Science Foundation of China No. 72004094

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2021 is held by Yaxue Ma, Zhichao Ba, and Gang Li. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

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