To the surmise that my timeline ought to include a specific proportion of tweets from physicists in other subdisciplines. This maybe naive expectation runs counter to my expertise. Additionally,in a (Twittermediated) conversation,the query was posed regardless of whether,throughout academic conferences,Twitter registered comparable levels of use by physicists operating in distinct subdisciplines. The stimulus for the question was the observation of low Twitter activity at an international conference onUNC1079 site stephen Webb stephen.x.webbport.ac.ukDCQE,University of Portsmouth,St Michael’s Road,Portsmouth PO PR,UKScientometrics :magnetism: anecdotal evidence suggested that members with the astronomy community,for instance,had been a lot more active users of Twitter than members from the condensed matter neighborhood. A literature evaluation failed to uncover investigation into this query. For that reason,in an attempt to ascertain no matter whether you’ll find subdisciplinary variations 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 analysis of tweets in the remaining conferences is constant with the suggestion that unique physics subdisciplines do indeed use Twitter in differing degrees. This paper is organized as follows. For readers that are unfamiliar with what is nonetheless a reasonably 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 strategies utilized along with the “Results” section presents the outcomes of an analysis with the information. After the “Conclusion” section,in which probable reasons for the observed distinction in Twitter use are explored,an “Appendix” lists the names on the conferences made use of inside the analysis; this,combined with all the open nature of Twitter,permits replication from the operate.Background and nomenclatureThe Twitter platformTwitter is an on the net microblogging platform that makes it possible for its users (“tweeps”) to publish messages of characters or much less. These messages (“tweets”) can also include things like URLs,photos or videos. A single user can decide to “follow” a different; when a person publishes a tweet that message right away seems in the timeline of all individuals who adhere to that individual. The character limit primarily guarantees the absence of nuance in tweets,and there’s a possibility that complicated ideas may be reduced and misrepresented as “sound bites”. Nonetheless,Twitter’s mixture of brevity and immediacy has produced it a popular platform: as of June there have been million active customers monthly,with million tweets being published daily (about.twitter. In spite of the message length restriction,tweeps make use of the service to publish opinions,gossip and news. Additionally to its widespread application in politics and journalism,largescale research of Twitter use have been employed by scientists to get a range of ends,such as the augmentation of earthquake response systems (Earle et althe investigation of how wellness details is disseminated (Scanfield et al. and as a implies of estimating crowd size (Botta et al A number of capabilities boost Twitter’s use as a communication tool as well as facilitate subsequent evaluation of tweets. Initially,Twitter features a “retweet” function. If an individual 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.