Organisational accounts engaged in scholarly communication on Twitter: Patterns of presence, activity and engagement

TL;DR

This study analyzes organizational Twitter accounts involved in scholarly communication, revealing their activity patterns, engagement levels, and the roles they play in shaping discourse, supported by an open dataset and a new methodological framework.

Contribution

It provides an open dataset of organizational accounts and a novel method for identifying them, highlighting their influence in scholarly social media communication.

Findings

Organizational accounts have larger follower bases and more scholarly tweets.

Scholarly tweets from organizations are highly visible but less conversational.

Government accounts elicit more engagement than research facilities.

Abstract

Organisational accounts are an integral part of the Twitter (now X) ecosystem. This study identified 9,842 research- and policy-related organisational accounts that had tweeted about scholarly publications by linking three global organisational databases (GRID, ROR, and Overton) with two altmetric databases containing Twitter data (Altmetric and the former Crossref Event Data). The resulting openly available dataset was used to examine organisational activity in scholarly communication across three dimensions: social media capital, tweeting activity, and engagement level. The results show that, compared to all Twitter users engaged in scholarly communication, organisational accounts hold a notable advantage in terms of follower bases and the proportion of scholarly tweets. Their scholarly tweets achieve high visibility through likes and retweets but perform weakly in generating more conversational forms of engagement, such as quotes and replies. Distinct patterns emerge across organisational categories: research facilities, in particular, demonstrate the strongest focus on scholarly tweeting, whereas government accounts are comparatively more successful in eliciting engagement across all metrics, including the more interactive ones. This study contributes both an open dataset of organisational accounts and a methodological framework for their identification, while also highlighting the important roles that organisations play in shaping scholarly discourse on social media.