For the surmise that my timeline should contain a particular proportion of tweets from physicists in other subdisciplines. This probably naive expectation runs counter to my experience. Additionally,inside a (Twittermediated) conversation,the question was posed no matter whether,in the course of academic conferences,Twitter registered similar levels of use by physicists functioning in different subdisciplines. The stimulus for the query was the observation of low Twitter activity at an international conference onStephen Webb stephen.x.MedChemExpress Triptorelin webbport.ac.ukDCQE,University of Portsmouth,St Michael’s Road,Portsmouth PO PR,UKScientometrics :magnetism: anecdotal proof suggested that members of your astronomy community,for example,had been much more active customers of Twitter than members of the condensed matter neighborhood. A literature assessment failed to uncover study into this query. Hence,in an attempt to establish regardless of whether you can find subdisciplinary differences in Twitter use,I undertook a study of scientific conferences whose theme was associated with some region of physics or astronomy. Seven conferences had been subsequently deemed unsuitable for analysis. An evaluation of tweets in the remaining conferences is constant with all the suggestion that various physics subdisciplines do indeed use Twitter in differing degrees. This paper is organized as follows. For readers who’re unfamiliar with what’s nonetheless a somewhat new tool for scholarly communication,the “Background PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24023058 and nomenclature” section presents some brief background to Twitter and explains the relevant nomenclature. The “Methods” section describes the techniques applied and the “Results” section presents the results of an analysis in the data. Following the “Conclusion” section,in which doable reasons for the observed distinction in Twitter use are explored,an “Appendix” lists the names on the conferences utilized in the evaluation; this,combined using the open nature of Twitter,permits replication in the perform.Background and nomenclatureThe Twitter platformTwitter is definitely an on-line microblogging platform that enables its customers (“tweeps”) to publish messages of characters or significantly less. These messages (“tweets”) may also incorporate URLs,photos or videos. 1 user can decide to “follow” yet another; when an individual publishes a tweet that message instantly seems in the timeline of all people who adhere to that particular person. The character limit basically guarantees the absence of nuance in tweets,and there’s a possibility that complex tips could be lowered and misrepresented as “sound bites”. Nonetheless,Twitter’s combination of brevity and immediacy has produced it a well known platform: as of June there have been million active customers per month,with million tweets being published daily (about.twitter. In spite of the message length restriction,tweeps use the service to publish opinions,gossip and news. Moreover to its widespread application in politics and journalism,largescale research of Twitter use have been employed by scientists for any assortment of ends,such as the augmentation of earthquake response systems (Earle et althe investigation of how well being details is disseminated (Scanfield et al. and as a implies of estimating crowd size (Botta et al Numerous functions improve Twitter’s use as a communication tool as well as facilitate subsequent analysis of tweets. Initial,Twitter features a “retweet” function. If somebody retweets a tweet,the original tweet appears within the timelines of that tweep’s followers and is identified as a retweet (RT). Holmberg and Thelwa.