Tweeting about journal articles: Engagement, marketing or just gibberish?

INTRODUCTION Altmetric indicators, defined as mentions from social media platforms to scientific literature, are seen as promising and with the potential to be used, when fully developed in research evaluation (Wilsdon et al., 2015). They are perceived as a means to connect with ‘broader audiences’ translating research findings from academia to society. Despite this enthusiastic appraisal on what could become from using social media in research evaluation, current findings leave mixed feelings due to the incapability to comprehend fully what we are analysing or measuring – societal impact, social engagement, interest? Research studies in this area have mainly focused on establishing comparisons with citation indicators (Haustein et al., 2014; Costas, Zahedi & Wouters, 2015), their disciplinary coverage (Zahedi, Costas & Wouters, 2014), or differences between the social media platforms altmetric data providers offer (Robinson-Garcia et al., 2014).