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Against the backdrop of the increasing relevance of social media in public science communication and engagement, this study aimed to expand our understanding of the relationships and interactions between social media users and scientific outputs. In order to do so, we explored the identities, characteristics and activities of South African science tweeters (or ZA science tweeters)—i.e. Twitter users in South Africa who tweet about research articles. The growing number of ZA science tweeters, both overall and in relative terms, suggests that Twitter users are increasingly using this social media platform as a tool to share and discuss scientific outputs. ZA science tweeters are actively contributing to the sharing of information about new research articles, but, in line with global trends, the bulk of science tweets amongst South African Twitter users comes from a small number of active tweeters, and only 1% of ZA science tweeters had more than 20,000 followers. About 6.6% of ZA science tweeters are scholars (or researchers) themselves. Compared to science tweeters who are not scholars, the scholar-tweeters sent out tweets about research articles more frequently, are active on Twitter over longer periods of time, publish more original tweets and use hashtags more frequently to increase their engagement on Twitter. In their Twitter bios, these scholars typically use academic terms to describe themselves, thereby presenting themselves as experts on this social media platform. Astronomy, astrophysics, ecology and the environment emerge as the research topics that are most popular amongst ZA science tweeters.

Social media platforms are increasingly part of the academic workflow. However, there is a lack of research that examines these activities, particularly at the author level. This paper explores the activity of researchers in the Twittersphere by analyzing a large database of Web of Science authors systematically identified on Twitter using data from Altmetric.com. Using this information, this paper explores and compares patterns of tweeted and self-tweeted publications with other academic activities, such as citations, self-citations, and authorship at the author level. This paper also compares the thematic orientation among these different activities by analyzing the similarity of the research topics of the publications tweeted, cited, and authored. The results show that the productivity and impact of researchers, as defined by conventional bibliometric indicators, are not correlated to their popularity on the Twitter platform and that scholars generally tend to tweet about topics closely related to the publications they author and cite. These findings suggest that social media metrics capture a broader aspect of the academic workflow that is most likely related to science communication, dissemination, and engagement with wider audiences and that differs from conventional forms of impact as captured by citations. Areas for further exploration are also proposed.1

The age of researchers is a critical factor necessary to study the bibliometric characteristics of the scholars that produce new knowledge. In bibliometric studies, the age of scientific authors is generally missing; however, the year of the first publication is frequently considered as a proxy of the age of researchers. In this article, we investigate what are the most important bibibliometric factors that can be used to predict the age of researchers (birth and PhD age). Using a dataset of 3574 researchers from Québec for whom their Web of Science publications, year of birth and year of their PhD are known, our analysis falls under the linear regression setting and focuses on investigating the predictive power of various regression models rather than data fitting, considering also a breakdown by fields. The year of first publication proves to be the best linear predictor for the age of researchers. When using simple linear regression models, predicting birth and PhD years result in an error of about 3.7 years and 3.9 years, respectively. Including other bibliometric data marginally improves the predictive power of the regression models. A validation analysis for the field breakdown shows that the average length of the prediction intervals vary from 2.5 years for Basic Medical Sciences (for birth years) up to almost 10 years for Education (for PhD years). The average models perform significantly better than the models using individual observations. Nonetheless, the high variability of data and the uncertainty inherited by the models advice to caution when using linear regression models for predicting the age of researchers.

This paper explores the characteristics of DataCite to determine its possibilities and potential as a new bibliometric data source to analyze the scholarly production of open data. Open science and the increasing data sharing requirements from governments, funding bodies, institutions and scientific journals has led to a pressing demand for the development of data metrics. As a very first step towards reliable data metrics, we need to better comprehend the limitations and caveats of the information provided by sources of open data. In this paper, we critically examine records downloaded from the DataCite's OAI API and elaborate a series of recommendations regarding the use of this source for bibliometric analyses of open data. We highlight issues related to metadata incompleteness, lack of standardization, and ambiguous definitions of several fields. Despite these limitations, we emphasize DataCite's value and potential to become one of the main sources for data metrics development. ; This study has been partially supported by the European Commission project RTD-B6-00964-2013 Monitoring the evolution and benefits of Responsible Research and Innovation (MoRRI). Nicolas Robinson-Garcia is currently supported by a Juan de la Cierva-Formación grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. ; Peer Reviewed

Trabajo presentado a la 21st International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, celebrada en Valencia (España) del 14 al 16 de septiembre de 2016. ; International scientific mobility is acknowledged to be a key mechanism for the diffusion of knowledge, particularly tacit or 'sticky' knowledge that cannot be transferred without geographical proximity and personal contact (Frenken 2010), for the incorporation of young researchers into elite transnational scientific networks (Laudel 2005), and for accessing additional resources or infrastructures that are essential to the research process but located in other places. The benefits of mobility as a means for knowledge diffusion are used as justification for the support policies and programmes that encourage the mobility of European Researchers (CEC 2004, 2008). The demand for researcher mobility indicators has been building in the EU since the launching of the Mobility Strategy for the European Research Area (CEC 2001). ; Peer Reviewed

We propose institutional mobility indicators based on researchers' mobility flows in 22 major fields of science across 1,130 Leiden Ranking institutions from 64 countries. We base our indicators on data from the Dimensions database and Global Research Identifier Database. We use researchers' first and last affiliations to estimate the extent authors have moved across institutions as well as countries. For each institution, we quantify the shares of researchers with the same affiliation (insiders), those who came from another institution within the country (domestic outsiders), and those coming from a different country (foreign outsiders). Institutions in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe have the highest share of insiders, whereas institutions in Northern America and Western and Northern Europe have a higher share of foreign outsiders. Foreign outsiders are most common in small and wealthy countries. No disciplinary differences are observed, as captured by the field classification scheme of Dimensions.

In exceptional circumstances such as health pandemics, it is to be expected that policy actions are supported by a balanced use of scientific information to support decision-making that impacts the lives of citizens. However, situations in which no scientific consensus has been reached due to either insufficient, inconclusive or contradicting findings place strain on governments and public organizations which are forced to take action under circumstances of uncertainty. In this chapter, we focus on the case of COVID-19, its effects on children and the public debate around the reopening of schools. The aim is to better understand the relationship between policy interventions in the face of an uncertain and rapidly changing knowledge landscape and the subsequent use of scientific information in public debates related to the policy interventions. Our approach is to combine scientific information from journal articles and preprints with their appearance in the popular media, including social media. First, we provide a picture of the different scientific areas and approaches, by which the effects of COVID-19 on children are being studied (e.g., transmission, infection, severity, etc.). This provides a snapshot of the scientific focus and priorities in relation to COVID-19 and children. Second, we identify news media and social media attention around the COVID-19 scientific output related to children and schools. We focus on policies and media responses in three countries: Spain, South Africa and the Netherlands. These countries have followed very different policy actions with regard to the reopening of schools and represent very different policy approaches to the same problem. We analyse the activity in (social) media around the debate between COVID-19, children and school closures by focusing on the use of references to scientific information in the debate. Finally, we analyse the dominant topics that emerge in the news outlets and the online debates. We draw attention to illustrative cases of miscommunication related to scientific output and conclude the chapter by discussing how information from scientific publication, the media and policy actions shape the public discussion in the context of a global health pandemic.