Tweet or Publish: A Comparison of 395 Professors on Twitter

Introduction Twitter is increasingly accepted as a venue to consume and disseminate information (Gruzd et al., 2012) and is used by scholars to share information about (a) professional discussions, (b) network with others, (c) offer help/request help, (d) call attention to other social media involvement, (e) personal discussions, and (f) impression management (Veletsianos, 2012). It is also seen as one of the most promising sources to measure broader research impact in the context of “altmetrics” (Priem et al., 2010) The idea of examining scholars’ interactions and output on the web to understand how events affected societal impact and influence of scholarly work was discussed by Cronin (Cronin, 2005, p. 196) early on, who argued that there would “soon be a critical mass of web-based digital objects and usage statistics on which to model scholars’ communication behaviours... and with which to track their scholarly influence and impact.” It is unclear what types of effect tweets have on scholarly production and scholarly impact. To examine whether there is an impact, this work contrasts the tweeting behaviour with the publication activity of 395 professors on Twitter.