Understanding the dynamics involving social media and academia

• Grant number: 22/13890-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: April 01, 2023
• End date: March 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science
• Principal Investigator: Diego Raphael Amancio
• Grantee: Ana Caroline Medeiros Brito
• Supervisor: Yong-Yeol Ahn
• Host Institution: Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Indiana University, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 20/14817-2 - Using complex networks and natural language processing to characterize and predict academic success, BP.DR

Abstract

Social media is an important way for scholars to achieve visibility and reach wider audiences. Given this context, this project research aims to explore the dynamics involving scholars on Twitter. More specifically, we want to characterize the scientific discussions on Twitter, the audience, and the speakers. For instance, we are interested in what kind of topic is discussed among scholars and how they reach different populations. After characterizing the data, we are also interested in understanding the interplay among scholars' features extracted from Twitter and their academic careers, and how virtual self-promotion impacts their citations. One of the main challenges of this project is to match entities present in both sources: Twitter data and academic data. Our methodology to solve this problem includes matching name strategies present in other works, and the adoption of algorithms to classify tweets and entities (profiles) using numeric and textual data. We expect to deepen our goals and obtain as result a more complete and complex overview of the scholars' environment to dialogue and promote themselves. (AU)