The role played by research scholars in the dissemination of scientific knowledge on social media has always been a central topic in social media metrics (altmetrics) research. Different approaches have been implemented to identify and characterize active scholars on social media platforms like Twitter. Some limitations of past approaches were their complexity and, most importantly, their reliance on licensed scientometric and altmetric data. The emergence of new open data sources such as OpenAlex or Crossref Event Data provides opportunities to identify scholars on social media using only open data. This paper presents a novel and simple approach to match authors from OpenAlex with Twitter users identified in Crossref Event Data. The matching procedure is described and validated with ORCID data. The new approach matches nearly 500,000 matched scholars with their Twitter accounts with a level of high precision and moderate recall. The data set of matched scholars is described and made openly available to the scientific community to empower more advanced studies of the interactions of research scholars on Twitter.

Intergovernmental Economic Organizations usually leverage the scientific capacity of their member countries to ensure economic prosperity through consensual science policies. The D-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation is an intergovernmental economic forum constituting eight developing Muslim-majority countries with a host of recent initiatives toward encouraging interstate scientific and technological collaborations. This study presents an overview of the forum’s overarching science policies and the research performance in the member countries in the past two decades. The individual D-8 countries’ performance over a set of STI indicators is analyzed to examine the driving forces of the STI system in the member countries. The findings revealed marked disparities among the countries in economic prosperity, R&D expenditure, and the stock of researchers in their STI systems. Although the aggregate research volume of the D-8 countries almost quadrupled over the 2010s compared with the previous decade, there are salient differences in the research capacity and scientific impact among these countries. GDP, R&D expenditure, human development index, GNI per capita, and the number of researchers (FTE per million inhabitants) contribute to explain the growth of publications in some of the D-8 countries. Knowledge sharing, transfer of technology, research collaboration, and investment in R&D infrastructure among the member countries underline the recent overarching scientific policy initiatives of the D-8 organization.

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world and is also a frequent subject of scientific research. However, the analytical possibilities of Wikipedia information have not yet been analyzed considering at the same time both a large volume of pages and attributes. The main objective of this work is to offer a methodological framework and an open knowledge graph for the informetric large-scale study of Wikipedia. Features of Wikipedia pages are compared with those of scientific publications to highlight the (dis)similarities between the two types of documents. Based on this comparison, different analytical possibilities that Wikipedia and its various data sources offer are explored, ultimately offering a set of metrics meant to study Wikipedia from different analytical dimensions. In parallel, a complete dedicated data set of the English Wikipedia was built (and shared) following a relational model. Finally, a descriptive case study is carried out on the English Wikipedia data set to illustrate the analytical potential of the knowledge graph and its metrics.

This study investigates the scientific mobility and international collaboration networks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region between 2008 and 2017. By using affiliation metadata available in scientific publications, we analyze international scientific mobility flows and collaboration linkages. Three complementary approaches allow us to obtain a detailed characterization of scientific mobility. First, we uncover the main destinations and origins of mobile scholars for each country. Results reveal geographical, cultural and historical proximities. Cooperation programs also contribute to explain some of the observed flows. Second, we use the academic age. The average academic age of migrant scholars in MENA was about 12.4 years. The academic age group 6–10 years is the most common for both emigrant and immigrant scholars. Immigrants are relatively younger than emigrants, except for Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Turkey. Scholars who migrated to Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Jordan, and Morocco were on average younger than emigrants by 1.5 years from the same countries. Third, we analyze gender differences. We observe a clear gender gap: Male scholars represent the largest group of migrants in MENA. We conclude by discussing the policy relevance of the scientific mobility and collaboration aspects.

This paper presents a new method for identifying scholars who have a Twitter account from bibliometric data from Web of Science (WoS) and Twitter data from Altmetric.com . The method reliably identifies matches between Twitter accounts and scholarly authors. It consists of a matching of elements such as author names, usernames, handles, and URLs, followed by a rule-based scoring system that weights the common occurrence of these elements related to the activities of Twitter users and scholars. The method proceeds by matching the Twitter accounts against a database of millions of disambiguated bibliographic profiles from WoS. This paper describes the implementation and validation of the matching method, and performs verification through precision-recall analysis. We also explore the geographical, disciplinary, and demographic variations in the distribution of scholars matched to a Twitter account. This approach represents a step forward in the development of more advanced forms of social media studies of science by opening up an important door for studying the interactions between science and social media in general, and for studying the activities of scholars on Twitter in particular.