You Can View the Tweets!: Content Analysis of Tweets Mentioning Works in an Institutional Repository

Academic libraries provide resources scholars can use to measure their scholarly output, including altmetrics products. Altmetrics recently emerged to accommodate the sharing and dissemination of scholarship on the social web. The scholarly community is grappling with understanding and utilizing altmetrics tracked by these products. This study uses altmetrics provided by Plum Analytics products to analyze the content of tweets mentioning works from a Digital Commons institutional repository. Plum Analytics provides quantitative (number of tweets and retweets) and qualitative (content of the tweets) data from Twitter. In this study qualitative data is collected and coded to determine the tone of the tweets (negative, neutral, or positive) and other information including the tweet’s author, the intended audience, and hashtags. Results from the study will help better understand the meaning behind Twitter data and consequently guide scholars on effectively using tweets as scholarship measures.