Tweet my paper: Who handles dissemination on Twitter?

The communication of research results is a task that is not equally distributed among authors. This paper explores how researchers distribute dissemination tasks on Twitter, the main channel for scientific communication. The main goal is to determinate which authorship position is most associated with self-dissemination of papers on Twitter, and whether this pattern is homogeneous across research areas. For Twitter mentions to papers, a large-scale dataset was created by merging Web of Science and Altmetric.com data, while for the identification of scholars on Twitter, an open dataset was used. Our main finding shows that 27% of Twitter users who mention papers are scholars and that only 13% of their mentions were for self-promotion purposes. Likewise, the corresponding author is the main responsible for this dissemination, a role that is mainly carried out by the first author.