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

2026-03-17

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of systematic identification and behavioral analysis of institutional social media accounts engaged in scholarly communication. By integrating heterogeneous data sources—including GRID, ROR, Overton, Altmetric, and Crossref Event Data—the project constructs the first open, globally scoped dataset of academic institutional social media accounts and proposes an analytical framework encompassing social media capital, posting activity, and engagement metrics. Findings reveal that institutional accounts significantly outperform others in follower count and proportion of scholarly tweets. Research facilities exhibit the strongest focus on academic content, whereas government agencies demonstrate superior performance across multiple interaction dimensions, including replies and citations. These results illuminate the distinct roles different institutional types play in scholarly discourse on social media platforms.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Social media analysis through the lenses of networks
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Bridging structured and unstructured data
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

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.

Problem

• organisational accounts
• scholarly communication
• Twitter
• social media engagement
• altmetrics

Innovation

• organisational accounts
• scholarly communication
• Twitter/X
• altmetrics
• data linkage