Abstract:

［Purpose/Significance］The first tweets of scientific publications are the beginning of papers’ dissemination on Twitter. Analysis on the first tweets is indicative of the accumulation pattern and users’ behavior characteristics of Twitter data. ［Design/Methodology］2,038,646 papers from the Web of Science have been collected as research objects, which were used to make a large scale comparison of accumulation speed and user type of papers’ first tweets in different fields.
［Findings/Conclusion］Papers in the fields of Biomedical & Health Sciences and Social Sciences & Humanities have the highest coverage percentages of Twitter data. Papers’ first tweets of Physical Sciences and Engineering have the fastest accumulation. In most cases, science communicators and researchers are mostly the fastest posters of the first tweets. For the majority of countries and regions with large number of papers’ Twitter data, Twitter users from the authors’ affiliated countries or regions have made significant contribution of posting the first tweets. ［Originality/Value］The analysis on first tweets is expected to shed light on the dissemination process of scientific papers on Twitter from the perspective of data accumulation.

Key words: Altmetrics, Social media metrics, Twitter; , The first tweet, Accumulation speed, User type