Title: Scholars on Twitter: who and how many are they?,
Abstract: In this paper we present a novel methodology for identifying scholars with a
Twitter account. By combining bibliometric data from Web of Science and Twitter
users identified by Altmetric.com we have obtained the largest set of
individual scholars matched with Twitter users made so far. Our methodology
consists of a combination of matching algorithms, considering different
linguistic elements of both author names and Twitter names; followed by a
rule-based scoring system that weights the common occurrence of several
elements related with the names, individual elements and activities of both
Twitter users and scholars matched. Our results indicate that about 2% of the
overall population of scholars in the Web of Science is active on Twitter. By
domain we find a strong presence of researchers from the Social Sciences and
the Humanities. Natural Sciences is the domain with the lowest level of
scholars on Twitter. Researchers on Twitter also tend to be younger than those
that are not on Twitter. As this is a bibliometric-based approach, it is
important to highlight the reliance of the method on the number of publications
produced and tweeted by the scholars, thus the share of scholars on Twitter
ranges between 1% and 5% depending on their level of productivity. Further
research is suggested in order to improve and expand the methodology.