What explains the imbalance use of social media across different countries? A cross country analysis of presence of Twitter users tweeting scholarly publications

Twitter users tweeting scholarly publications from different countries have been analysed. The aim is to explore how visible are different countries on Twitter (based on their self-assigned geo-locations obtained from altmetric.com) in comparison to their output size in the Web of Science. Some indicators such as Twitter presence and activity (such as number of user’s accounts, number of tweets, and number of publications tweeted) have been analysed for each country. Finally, the relationship between Twitter activity indicators and some demographic indicators (such as country’s population, education, internet users, ICT use and access) will be explored and potential factors affecting country’s activity on Twitter will be discussed. Exploring how technological access and development (technology orientation) of a country affects its scholarly twitter usage (scientific orientation) will help in interpreting country’s activity and in understanding the reasons why some countries are underrepresented on Twitter. Identification of such factors could help in gaining some insights on important barriers and limitations that may have an effect on usage of scholarly social media platforms by users from different countries and on considering ‘altmetric divide’ for any altmetrics applications at the country level.