Exploring Government Involvement in Academia and its Effect on Social Media

Our team became very intrigued by the effect social media has on the world around us. This paper aims to see whether the government increasing their involvement in science was leading to more discussion of academia on twitter, or if it was the millennials in university who are bringing science and academia to social media. Using the Altmetric data sets, the Twitter API and the Geonames API we were able to construct a starting point for our project.

After getting the three countries who had the most tweets regarding scientific research papers and three countries who had the least we began to collect specific data for each country and compared them to find patterns. We observed that all of the top three countries had a very similar percentage of students in postsecondary education as well as a significant amount of federal funding. We also noticed that out of the bottom three countries they all had a drastically lower percentage rate of students. As for their federal funding Russia and India had a significantly lower budget but China had more federal funding than both United Kingdom and Germany. With this we can deduce that the relationship between how many tweets regarding scientific articles and university students is the most significant.