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Twitter has increasingly become a resource used by academics to share scholarship and opinions within professional networks. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of Twitter use by urban planning faculty, reporting characteristics of users, the topics posted, and indicators of Twitter influence among urban planning faculty as well as those interested in planning from outside academic circles. Approximately one-third of urban planning academics are active Twitter users, and as of yet, there have been no empirical analyses of how and why they use the social media platform. This analysis uses Twitter data from active accounts for urban planning faculty in the U.S. and Canada identified as being used for professional purposes for the period from March 2007 to April 2019. Considering how planning academics use Twitter lends insights on its usefulness for academic discussion and scholarly communications. The conclusion discusses the prospects for planning academics to better utilize Twitter to broaden and deepen their professional activities while noting particular concerns.

Urban planning is characterized by involving a wide range of experts from a variety of fields. Therefore, planning research draws upon each of these fields in how it interprets an examines the natural and built environment as elements of human settlement activities. As a small professional and academic discipline incorporating aspects of design, policy, law, social sciences, and engineering, it is understandable that research outcomes are published in a broad range of academic outlets. It is useful for us to reflect on our research intentions, processes, and outcomes, which is also referred to as 'research about research,' with a focus on the scholarly products of urban planning academics. We can do this by examining our methodologies, subdomains, application of research to practice, research impact, and bibliometrics. The purpose of reflecting on our research helps us better understand research processes and the resulting body of urban planning research and scholarship as a whole.

This article discusses the relationship between Twitter usage and scholarly citations by urban planning academics in the U.S. and Canada. Social media and academic publications may be considered separate activities by some, but over the past decade there has been a convergence of the two. Social media and scholarship can be complementary not only when social media is used to communicate about new publications, but also to gather research ideas and build research networks. The analysis presented here explores this relationship for urban planning faculty using data for faculty who had active Twitter accounts between March 2007 and April 2019. Measures of Twitter activity were combined with Google Scholar citation data for 322 faculty with Twitter accounts. As expected, the results highlight that there are different patterns of Twitter activity between junior faculty and senior faculty both in terms of proportions of each rank using Twitter as well as activity levels on the social media platform. The results also suggest that Twitter activity does not have a statistically significant relationship with overall scholarly productivity as measured by citation levels.

Analyses of faculty citation activity usually focus on counts as a function of author characteristics, such as rank, gender, previous citation levels, and other factors influencing productivity and career path. Citation analyses of publications consider aspects, such as the number of authors, author reputation, author order, length of the title, methodology, and impact factors of the publication. While publication topics or discipline is considered important factors, they are more difficult to analyze, and therefore, performed less frequently. This article attempts to do that for the field of urban planning. Urban planning is multi-disciplinary and includes consideration of social, economic, technological, environmental, and political systems that shape human settlement patterns. It has been suspected that some topics are more popular and have larger audiences, therefore, are cited more often. Using nearly 15,000 urban planning publications, this article presents an analysis of topics to assess which are cited most frequently. The classification of publications was performed using a Support Vector Machine (SVM), a machine learning (ML) approach to text classification, using citation data from Google Scholar. The citation levels for the resulting categories are analyzed and discussed. ; Published version