Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages

Abstract: According to a survey we recently conducted, Twitter was ranked in the top three services used by Semantic Web researchers to spread information. In order to understand how Twitter is practically used for spreading scientific messages, we captured tweets containing the official hashtags of three conferences and studied (1) the type of content that researchers are more likely to tweet, (2) how they do it, and finally (3) if their tweets can reach other communities --in addition to their own. In addition, we also conducted some interviews to complete our understanding of researchers' motivation to use Twitter during conferences.