The SciELO 15 Years Conference on Twitter

The recent international conference which celebrated the 15 years of the SciELO Program was a huge success, with an average daily attendance of over 400 delegates. But the impact made by the event spread far and wide, thanks to its dissemination by social media.

Social media are turning out to be effective channels for the sharing of content and information. They are already important tools in the dissemination of knowledge, and their usefulness is growing in evaluating the impact and influence of research, by means of the new altmetrics. The social platform Twitter is showing itself to be particularly effective in disseminating information and data owing to the inherent characteristics of Web 2.0 upon which it is built. It is easy to use, collaborative and free of charge, and allows sharing in a dynamic, real-time flow, without rigid and formal rules, in addition to offering different ways for small text messages to be communicated, using special tags such as hashtags, with options to add links, images and videos. Hashtags index a term or a subject on Twitter by making up key words which combine a term with the hash (#) symbol which then makes the term an active hyperlink on Twitter, indexable by search engines and able to be retrieved and monitored. Clicking on hashtags or searching for them on systems such as Google allows access to the record of all the tweets with the indexed term (WIKEPEDIA  2013).

The SciELO 15 Years Conference adopted the #SciELO15 to facilitate the sharing of information and content from the event. The hashtag registered all mentions of the event on Twitter, making possible its monitoring, retrieval, identification and visualization of the dissemination of the Conference on this social network. Shown below is the reach of the SciELO 15 Years Conference on Twitter from 20/10/2013 to 28/10/2013, inclusive:

During the period from 20 – 28 October, the #SciELO15 registered 1,253 tweets. If we take account of other hashtags used to identify the event, such as #SciELO and #SciELO15Anos, then the number of tweets is even greater. The figures below show the distribution of the tweets over this period :

The tweets peaked during the conference, from 22 to 25 October 2013.

Source: http://www.tweetarchivist.com/4222ef96/2/Volume

These numbers are the result of the conference participants sharing the event. The chart below shows the biggest tweeters and the number of tweets:

Source: http://www.tweetarchivist.com/4222ef96/2/User

Source:  http://www.tweetarchivist.com/4222ef96/2/lang

The predominant language of the tweets was Portuguese (pt : n=583), followed closely by English (en: n=529) with Spanish in third place (es: n=82). Tweets were also seen in Italian (it), Slovenian (sl), German (de), French (fr) and even Tagalog (tl), the language of the Philippines!

Twitter allows the sharing of texts, links, images and even videos.

By monitoring the #SciELO15 hashtag, it was possible to map the conversations about the conference. Below is the resulting relationship map:

See this dynamic map at the following link: http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/?key=tI_tXHqY78HdQWzki3qq8Tw&sheet=oaw

The network of relationships that resulted is decentralized, with some authors (Twitter profiles) highlighted in the spreading of the hashtag to their followers. Highly influential authors in the network were identified by the number of followers as seen in the figure below:

Source: http://www.tweetarchivist.com/4222ef96/2/influencers

To understand the extent to which the SciELO 15 Years Conference was spread, just imagine the profile @redescielo sharing information about the event in real time with its 21,943 followers, in addition to the profile @PLOSONE with its 19,758 followers, @plevy with its 19,296 followers and so on. Adding up the followers of the 10 most influential profiles that were tweeting or re-tweeting the #SciELO15 gives 134,231 followers, or users of Twitter. The SciELO 15 Years Conference reached thousands of people through the #SciELO15 hashtag.

Congratulations and thank you to all that tweeted using the #SciELO15!

And you, do you already have a Twitter account?

Reference:

WIKIPEDIA. Hashtag. [viewed 04 November 2013]. Available from: <http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashtag>.

External links

Images of the SciELO 15 Years Conference shared on Twitter – http://www.tweetarchivist.com/4222ef96/2/media.
Twitter – https://twitter.com/

About Sibele Fausto

Collaborator on the SciELO program, post-graduate in Information Science from the School of Communication and the Arts of the University of São Paulo (PPGCI-ECA-USP), specialist in Health Sciences information at the Federal University of São Paulo in partnership with the Latin American Center for Health Sciences Information (UNIFESP-BIREME-PAHO-WHO), Sibele Fausto is a librarian in the Technical Department of the Integrated Library System of the University of São Paulo (DT-SIBi-USP).

Translated from the original in Portuguese by Nicholas Cop Consulting.