How do influential and non-influential papers spread online?

TL;DR

This study analyzes how influential and non-influential scientific papers spread on social media, revealing distinct diffusion patterns and community engagement differences using a large Twitter dataset.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of the diffusion dynamics of influential versus non-influential papers on social media, based on a large-scale dataset.

Findings

Non-influential papers show multiple, sparse, short bursts of diffusion.

Influential papers have persistent, dense, large-scale bursts.

Influential papers reach many loosely connected communities.

Abstract

Social media has become an important channel for publicizing academic research. Employing a dataset of about 10 million tweets of 584,264 scientific papers from 2012 to 2018, this study investigates the differential diffusion of influential and non-influential papers (divided by Average journal impact factor percentile). We find that non-influential papers shows a diffusion trend with multiple rounds, sparse, short-duration and small-scale bursts. In contrast, the bursts of influential journals are characterized by a small number of persistent, dense and large-scale bursts. Influential papers are generally disseminated to many loosely connected communities, while non-influential papers are diffused to several densely connected communities.