KlawiT

The KlawiT project addresses the question of what makes a tweet scientific. 
The two partners involved in the project are the German national subject libraries ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences and ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. 
Nowadays, social media is also used by scientists to announce research findings and even to discuss them. Many researchers are now on Twitter, yet most of the content they post is of a personal nature. Online research has so far failed to address the question of whether tweets that have no personal content actually contain scientific information. This raises the question of when a tweet is scientific in nature, or at least has a scientific context.

The partners involved in the KlawiT project are now examining this question using various resources, including heterogeneous collections of tweets compiled on the basis of specialist terms from the world of medicine. By investigating the characteristics of these tweets, the product team hopes to establish a classification framework capable of determining what characterises a scientific tweet. It is also hoped that the project will provide some indications as to how tweeting scientists might be classified as well as offering guidelines on creating scientific tweets.