The Elon Musk Paradox: Quantifying the Presence and Impact of Twitter Bots on Altmetrics with Focus in Social Sciences
[version 1; peer review: 1 major revision, 2 accepted]
Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado, 
Daniel Torres-Salinas With the rise of Twitter bots in social and political spheres, their implications in scientific communication and altmetrics have become a concern. However, there are no large-scale studies that identify the population of bots and their impact on altmetrics. This quantitative study aims to analyse the presence and impact of Twitter bots in the dissemination of Social Science papers on Twitter and to explore the specific case of Information Science & Library Science (ISLS) as a case study. The overall presence of bots discussing Social Science papers has been found to account for 3.61% of users and 3.85% of tweets. However, this presence and impact is uneven across disciplines, highlighting Criminology & Penology with 12.4% of the mentions made by bots. In the specific case of ISLS, it has been determined by Kendall's correlation that mentions of bots have no impact on altmetrics.
More details
- License: CC BY
- Review type: Open Review
- Publication type: Conference Paper
- Conference: 27th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI 2023)
- Publisher: International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators
Citation
Arroyo-Machado, W., Herrera-Viedma, E. & Torres-Salinas, D. (2023). The Elon Musk Paradox: Quantifying the Presence and Impact of Twitter Bots on Altmetrics with Focus in Social Sciences [version 1; peer review: 1 major revision, 2 accepted] [preprint]. 27th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI 2023).
