Not necessarily completely accurate. For instance,it truly is attainable that a lot of people found themselves unable to attend a conference but still seem on a list of delegates; other people could possibly have registered late and do not seem on such a list; but other people may well have requested not to have their names seem on a public list. In addition,not all participants attend all readily available sessions of a conference. Nonetheless,while there’s an inevitable uncertainty within the metric,the item of conference participants and conference duration does seem to supply a reasonable measure on the size of an occasion. Thankfully,as is going to be seen in “Results” section,an uncertainty in participant quantity as big as (which may very well be viewed as getting unduly pessimistic) turns out to not affect the conclusions. The conferences within this sample ranged in size from participants at a single intense to participants at the other. An evaluation showed no connection among the number of participants plus the level of twitter activity.Conference hashtagsTwo programs have been written to harvest tweets that contained a conference hashtag or associated keyword: a single plan utilised a Search API,the other a Streaming API. The latter API keeps a persistent http connection open; the former requires the polling of a rest endpoint,but is probably superior suited for singular searches. Twitter itself states that the Search API is just not a complete index of all tweets,and investigation by GonzalezBailon et al. shows that the Search API “overrepresents the a lot more central customers and does not supply an accurate image of peripheral activity”. Nonetheless,in initial tests aimed at harvesting conferencebased tweets,the system based on the Search API was identified to become far more robust. In particular,for conferences where Twitter activity was low,the Streaming API harvested fewer tweets (due mostly to timeout problems) than the Search API. However,each and every tweet identified by the Streaming API was also identified by the Search API. Consequently,the selection was made to harvest conference tweets using the Search API. Some conference delegates might choose to tweet in the occasion without the need of making use of a hashtag or keyword,and such contenteven if it have been straight relevant for the conferencewould be invisible to the harvesting program. By the exact same token,nonetheless,precisely the same content material would be tough to recognize for other users. It is actually probably,consequently,that the number of such untagged tweets are going to be small when compared with the quantity labelled with a conference hashtag. It need to also be noted that there’s degeneracy amongst hashtag usage: different conferences legitimately employ precisely the same hashtag. In order to minimise the likelihood of harvesting inappropriate tweets,the search on a certain hashtag or keyword was 1-Deoxynojirimycin restricted towards the dates on which the relevant conference was held. One example is,the hashtag #isb was used by a conference organised by the International Society of Biomechanics but in addition for 1 organised by the International Society of Bassists (and fairly possibly by various other societies); limiting the search to the dates on which conferences had been held was a way of minimising this effect,at PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21383499 the expense of missing out on pre and postconference tweets. There had been also occasions on which the usage of a hashtag was contested through an event. By way of example,#pathways would happen to be a reputable hashtag for one of the most Twitteractive conferences within this sample,“Pathways Towards Habitable PlanetsII”. Indeed,this certain hashtag was.