Which social media interactions indicate positive opinions about cited publications? A comparison of user survey and sentiment analysis.

One of the central questions in altmetrics study is: which social media actions could be the best signal of positive stance towards scientific outcome? To investigate this question, a two-level study was performed. First, we conducted an online survey [1] and analyzed the results of more than 3,400 participants. Second, we performed sentiment analysis of comments in social media platforms. We investigated comments to social media posts (Reddit posts, Youtube videos, Google posts) that cite scientific articles and the comments section on the PLOS journal webpage. The exploratory online survey inquired researchers from 84 countries in economics (n = 2,072) and social sciences (n=767). With its goal to determine actions on social media platforms that might be interpreted as positive stance towards scientific outcomes, 90 platforms (e.g., Facebook, Mendeley, ResearchGate) with 107 corresponding actions (e.g., post about academic research on Facebook, comment on a post about academic research on Google+ ) were studied. The sentiment analysis was performed on (1) ·3,851,304 Youtube comments, (2)·718,068 Reddit comments, (3)·23,014 comments on PLOS journal webpage and (4) 8,189 comments to Google+ posts. The analysis revealed that Youtube videos have the highest fraction of positive sentiments per publication, followed by Google+ and Reddit comments. Our results suggest that Youtube comments counts can potentially be used as a reliable expression of positive stance towards a scientific outcome. At the same time, survey results disposed toward comments on a post on Reddit as the best positive stance signal. Thus, these to some extent contradictory results has to be discussed with the Altmetric Conference audience. Results of the survey and sentiment analysis were presented in the form of poster. [1] Steffen Lemke, Maryam Mehrazar, Athanasios Mazarakis, and Isabella Peters, “Are There Different Types of Online Research Impact?,” in Proceedings of the 81st ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Building an Ethical & Sustainable Information Future with Emerging Technology, Vancouver, Canada, 2018.Poster Presented at 5:AM Altmetrics Conference in London, 26-28.09.2018