TY - JOUR

T1 - Scholarly book publishers as publicity agents for SSH titles on Twitter

AU - Wang, Yajie

AU - Zuccala, Alesia Ann

PY - 2021/4/26

Y1 - 2021/4/26

N2 - The purpose of this paper was to examine the presence of scholarly book publishers on Twitter, and tweets about books in 10 SSH disciplines (2014-2018). This included time of tweet relative to the book's publication date and time span of twitter activity. We also investigated the 'categories of conversation' in publisher tweets, with a focus on hashtags and @-mentions. Data collection involved matching 15,454 unique book titles from the BKCI-Web of Science with tweets retrieved from Altmetrics.com, using ISBNs. This led to a working dataset of n=6,258 books (41%), which had received at least one tweet. Our analyses show that scholarly publishers have been using Twitter more and more over a five year period, especially commerical publishers. Commercial publishers are more likely than university presses to have multiple Twitter accounts. Both, though mainly commercial publishers, are active at targeting the Twitter accounts of book authors, book editors, other individuals and universities/institutions /organisations. Whilst re-tweets do not often follow first, or 'initiator' tweets made by publishers, publisher engagement in general corresponds significantly with other Tweets, and contributes to keeping the book active for a longer period on Twitter. Publishers play a key role as promotional agents, particularly when a scholarly title is part of a special offer, relevant to a conference, event, or special calendar date, when an author is a prize winner, or, if author-agreements have been made in regards to open access book chapters.

AB - The purpose of this paper was to examine the presence of scholarly book publishers on Twitter, and tweets about books in 10 SSH disciplines (2014-2018). This included time of tweet relative to the book's publication date and time span of twitter activity. We also investigated the 'categories of conversation' in publisher tweets, with a focus on hashtags and @-mentions. Data collection involved matching 15,454 unique book titles from the BKCI-Web of Science with tweets retrieved from Altmetrics.com, using ISBNs. This led to a working dataset of n=6,258 books (41%), which had received at least one tweet. Our analyses show that scholarly publishers have been using Twitter more and more over a five year period, especially commerical publishers. Commercial publishers are more likely than university presses to have multiple Twitter accounts. Both, though mainly commercial publishers, are active at targeting the Twitter accounts of book authors, book editors, other individuals and universities/institutions /organisations. Whilst re-tweets do not often follow first, or 'initiator' tweets made by publishers, publisher engagement in general corresponds significantly with other Tweets, and contributes to keeping the book active for a longer period on Twitter. Publishers play a key role as promotional agents, particularly when a scholarly title is part of a special offer, relevant to a conference, event, or special calendar date, when an author is a prize winner, or, if author-agreements have been made in regards to open access book chapters.

U2 - 10.1007/s11192-021-03947-6

DO - 10.1007/s11192-021-03947-6

M3 - Journal article

VL - 126

SP - 4817

EP - 4840

JO - Scientometrics

JF - Scientometrics

SN - 0138-9130

ER -