Tweet your preprints

By Michael Banks

The Twitter bandwagon keeps on rolling.

Earlier this month Physics World joined the likes of Barack Obama, 10 Downing Street and the US rapper Snoop Dogg on Twitter — a website where people can post an answer to the question “what are you doing?” in under 140 words.

While some people actually do write — or “tweet” — what they are doing in every detail, most use it to post interesting links to stories that appear on the web. For example, Physics World tweets links to stories and blog entries that appear on our website.

Now, Robert Simpson, a PhD student from Cardiff University in the UK, has created a website that ranks papers appearing on the arXiv preprint server according to their popularity on Twitter.

His website searches Twitter for tweets that mention an arXiv url or posts that are tagged “#arxiv” and include the paper’s unique identifier.

The website retrieves and lists all the tweets and produces a table of the most popular papers, authors and arXiv categories ranked by how many tweets they have received.

The website has only been active since 16 April, but already there have been 75 tweets quoting arXiv papers.

This week’s top three papers include an introduction to machine learning, a 3D study of the photosphere of HD99563 and power-law distributions in empirical data.

The paper ranked fourth in the table, however, as far as I could tell was an April fool’s joke, which proclaimed that pi has changed since 1900 BC. So maybe think twice before taking such a ranking seriously.