10,000 #OpenScience Tweets

March 20, 2014 in Media, Research, Tools

We have collected 10,000+ tweets using the #openscience hashtag on Twitter, and invite volunteers to help analyse the data. The twelve most-retweeted tweets are embedded below.

Happily, just over 4,600 accounts have participated in the Open Science community with its eponymous hashtag, in this span. The 10,000 tweets have accrued over ten weeks. Our own @openscience on Twitter has tweeted most, over 600 times at the hashtag, as well as having received the most retweets and @ mentions, over 8,000 in these 10,000.

We have modified the vis which came with the data via the satisfying TAGS effort shared by Martin Hawksey. We added looks at the numbers of mentions and of mentions per tweets for top tweeters, and rankings of top tweets for the past ten weeks to Martin’s default views. We will continue collecting tweets, but do note that in another month or so, we will reach Google Docs limits e.g. on numbers of cells. We will use additional sheets, so links to all data will have changed, just how depending on when you are reading this post. Ask us @openscience on Twitter.

Help wanted

More could be done; won’t you help? Leave a reply below or ping us @openscience on Twitter if you need edit access to the sheet itself but we would like to see data and analyses in other tools as well. Our work to this point is only to get something started.

Top #openscience tweets of the past ten weeks

 

 

 

 

 

 


The above list is not dynamic. The data collected and displayed here, however are dynamic and refresh themselves hourly.

Not all tweets which are about Open Science include the #openscience hashtag. In a perfectly semantic world, they would and when they can, they really should. It has helped to form a community among the 4,600+ accounts participating in these ten weeks and many others in recent years. A couple reasons the hashtag might not be used in a relevant tweet include the character limit on tweets and lack of awareness of hashtags or of the term Open Science.

We take our organising and leadership role seriously at @openscience on Twitter, an account shared by many in the community. We have a simple policy that all our tweets should be related to Open Science. Even at our account, not all our tweets include the #openscience hashtag, particularly as we discuss related concerns such as Citizen Science or Open Access. An example tweet from the time frame considered here, related to Open Science but not hashtagged as such is below. In this case, the limit on tweet length and the topic led to including #openaccess, not #openscience:

 

The most retweeted, Open Science related tweet of all time, so far as we know, did not use the #openscience hashtag but was lovely. From the Lord of Dance and Prince of Swimwear:

 

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