When do tweeters tweet about Science? Exploratory analysis of the Twitter dissemination of scientific publications by weekdays and months

This study advances insights into the distribution of tweets captured by Altmetric.com in terms of the dates tweeting activity ensues. The following primary research question is investigated: When do tweeters tweet about scientific publications? For this work,the dataset in this study contained 25.2 million tweets, which were tweeted from January 2012 through December 2016. Those tweets referred to 3.3 million distinct scientific publications, which were published from 2012 onwards. In this work, tweet volume (TV)—tweets mentioning scientific publications in a specific time unit—and the publication volume (PV)—volume of distinct publications tweeted in a specific time unit—were calculated. The TV/PV ratio was calculated in order to measure the tweeting intensity in a given time unit. To observe differences in timely patterns, a heterogeneous selection of countries were selected, which included three Western European countries (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Spain), a set of North African states (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt), as well as a representative of the Southern Hemisphere (South Africa). Results highlight the relevance of considering time dynamics of activity when studying social media metrics stemming from sources with a strong cultural or geographical component, as in the case of Twitter.