Ageing Factor: a Potential Altmetric for Observing Events and Attention Spans in Microblogs

Our long-term goal is to study public communication about science: understanding what the public thinks about scientific research is important for many reasons, from developing science policy, through making the case for technological developments and determining the impact of research, to simply being able to characterize the vibrant public discourse which marks a healthy society, in which science plays as important a part as politics, popular culture or the arts. The new media of the social web, which are open to all, offer a fresh insight into public opinion to supplement the surveys, and so forth, used in Public Understanding of Science (PUS) research [20]. Because of the scale of data available (Twitter claims there are 340M tweets per day), quantitative metrics are needed to aggregate the contributions of many individuals. Informetrics research has developed and used quantitative measures to study scholarly communication in traditional media for decades. Informetric methods have been shown to transfer to communication on the web [1] and latterly social media / Web 2.0 [2], in which field they are coming to be known as altmetrics. Altmetrics adapt tried and tested informetric methods to the analysis of scientific communication in social media. Used along with natural language methods, such as clustering and summarization, we believe they have much to offer analysts. Our aim, in the experiments reported in this paper, was to study a metric called ageing factor as a means to characterize whether people’s interest in discussion of scientific topics on Twitter is sustained or transient.