What do people study when they study Twitter? Classifying Twitter related academic papers

(2013) What people study when they study Twitter: classifying Twitter related academic papers. It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from the work. All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement. What people study when they study Twitter Classifying Twitter related academic papers Structured Abstract Purpose Since its introduction in 2006, messages posted to the microblogging system Twitter have provided a rich dataset for researchers, leading to the publication of over a thousand academic papers. This paper aims to identify this published work and to classify it in order to understand Twitter based research. Design/methodology/approach Firstly the papers on Twitter were identified. Secondly, following a review of the literature, a classification of the dimensions of microblogging research was established. Thirdly, papers were qualitatively classified using open coded content analysis based on the papers title and abstract in order to analyze method, subject, and approach. Findings The majority of published work relating to Twitter concentrates on aspects of the messages sent and details of the users. A variety of methodological approaches are used across a range of identified domains. Research Limitations This work reviewed the abstracts of all papers available via database search on the term Twitter and this has two major implications the full papers are not considered and so works may be misclassified if their abstract is not clear, 2) publications not indexed by the databases, such as book chapters, are not included. The study is focussed on microblogging, the applicability of the approach to other media is not considered. Originality/value To date there has not been an overarching study to look at the methods and purpose of those using Twitter as a research subject. Our major contribution is to scope out papers published on Twitter until the close of 2011. The classification derived here will provide a framework within which researchers studying Twitter related topics will be able to position and ground their work.