Exploiting Tweet Sentiments in Altmetrics Large-Scale Data

TL;DR

This study analyzes large-scale Twitter data to understand social media sentiments towards scientific publications, employing sentiment classification, specialized lexicons, and aspect-based analysis to reveal community-specific opinions and improve scientific communication.

Contribution

It introduces a novel sentiment analysis framework combining extended lexicons, harmonic mean-based measures, and aspect-based analysis for large-scale social media data on scientific literature.

Findings

Research communities show different sentiments towards their fields.

In Medicine and related fields, tweets focus on results.

In Physics and Computer Science, tweets focus on methodology.

Abstract

This article aims to exploit social exchanges on scientific literature, specifically tweets, to analyse social media users' sentiments towards publications within a research field. First, we employ the SentiStrength tool, extended with newly created lexicon terms, to classify the sentiments of 6,482,260 tweets associated with 1,083,535 publications provided by Altmetric.com. Then, we propose harmonic means-based statistical measures to generate a specialized lexicon, using positive and negative sentiment scores and frequency metrics. Next, we adopt a novel article-level summarization approach to domain-level sentiment analysis to gauge the opinion of social media users on Twitter about the scientific literature. Last, we propose and employ an aspect-based analytical approach to mine users' expressions relating to various aspects of the article, such as tweets on its title, abstract, methodology, conclusion, or results section. We show that research communities exhibit dissimilar sentiments towards their respective fields. The analysis of the field-wise distribution of article aspects shows that in Medicine, Economics, Business & Decision Sciences, tweet aspects are focused on the results section. In contrast, Physics & Astronomy, Materials Sciences, and Computer Science these aspects are focused on the methodology section. Overall, the study helps us to understand the sentiments of online social exchanges of the scientific community on scientific literature. Specifically, such a fine-grained analysis may help research communities in improving their social media exchanges about the scientific articles to disseminate their scientific findings effectively and to further increase their societal impact.