Letter to the editor: Should stricter regulations be set for the use or analysis of Twitter (and other social media) in academic publishing?
| Date | 29 November 2023 |
| Pages | 1306-1309 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-11-2023-533 |
| Published date | 29 November 2023 |
| Author | Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva,Serhii Nazarovets |
Letter to the editor: Should stricter
regulations be set for the
use or analysis of Twitter
(and other social media)
in academic publishing?
Dear Aslib Journal of Information Management Editors,
Currently, the pursuit of research utilizing Twitter data, alongside various other social
media platforms, has become an increasingly prevalent undertaking (Sinnenberg et al., 2017).
The recent (end of June 2023) restrictions placed by Twitter (now X) on public access to
Tweets, requiring a login in order to view them, compounded by a daily limit to the number of
Tweets that can be viewed, places –we feel –a damper on open communication via social
media and is thus counter to open science principles. These communication and linking
limitations seem to, in one respect, defeat the purpose of such social media platforms, which
should be open to the public, at least to view such communications. With truncated access, the
freedom and spirited nature of communication become limited.
We reflect briefly on what this closed-access approach might mean for academic research
and suggest two aspects that should be taken into account when conducting Twitter (or any
social media)-based research. Following a spot check of the instructions for authors of some
journals in which Twitter-related papers have been published, we were unable to identify any
guidelines specific for Twitter (or any social media)-based research.
The first issuewe touch on is whether social media that does nothave open and unfettered
access should be researched. If the “raw data”of such analyses –in the case of Twitter, the
tweets themselves –are not visible to thepublic, then how are analysesbased on Twitter being
verified by editorsand peer reviewers, surely not all of whom have sign-in access to Twitter?
Therefore, in our opinion, authors should be obliged to keep and present the raw data (i.e.
tweets)of any Twitter-basedresearch, as hard-copyevidence of their research.As one example,
a recent review by Foderaro and Lorentzen (2023) claims to have 30,000 tweets as the “final
dataset”. Yet, thereis no supplement with an open collection of this dataset that would allow
any reader or memberof the public to verify –and reproduce –the validity of that dataset and
thus the study’s claimed findings. The journal in which that paper was publishedclaims to
follow a set of open science/data principles,the Transparency and OpennessPromotion (TOP)
Guidelines.In contrast, as one example,Banda et al. (2021) present the full rawtweet dataset on
Zenodo.We recommend that even at the post-publication stage, Foderaro and Lorentzen (20 23)
and Aslib Journalof Information Management could still makethe raw tweet dataset publicly
available to make the study TOP-compliant.
AJIM
75,6
1306
Author contributions: Except for the database search in Web of Science Core Collection, which was
conducted by the second author, the authors contributed equally to all other aspects of the paper,
including, but not exclusively limited to, conceptual design, discussion, methodology, analysis and
validation, writing and editing all versions of the manuscript.
Data availability statement: The raw data of the analysis in Web of Science Core Collection is
available in the Supplementary file.
Conflicts of interest: The authors declare no relevant conflicts of interest.
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 75 No. 6, 2023
pp. 1306-1309
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-11-2023-533
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