Public Reaction to Scientific Research via Twitter Sentiment Prediction

Social media platforms have become a place where users collaborate, share their ideas and also have conflicts (Hansson et al., 2019; Hansson and Ludwig, 2019). With 126 million active daily users (Shaban, 2019), Twitter is the dominant microblogging platform on which users discuss a breadth of subjects and even play a role in influencing current trends. Users on Twitter post short and often informal messages (tweets) in which they share information and project opinions and sentiments about what is going on in the world. Twitter has been a major platform for sharing scholarly articles, and many researchers have used it to develop various metrics for scholarly articles (Haustein, 2019). Other social media platforms like Facebook and Weibo have also been sources to study online users' responses (Kou et al., 2017). Social media platforms have become a hub where users express their opinions and emotions related to multiple fields of interest (Chatterjee et al., 2019). Researchers have studied the sentiments and emotions associated with research articles on these platforms (Freeman et al., 2019, 2020).