Profiling Bot Accounts Mentioning COVID-19 Publications on Twitter

This paper presents preliminary findings regarding automated bots mentioning scientific papers about COVID-19 publications on Twitter. A quantitative approach was adopted to characterize social and posting patterns of bots, in contrast to other users, in Twitter scholarly communication. Our findings indicate that bots play a prominent role in research dissemination and discussion on the social web. We observed 0.45% explicit bots in our sample, producing 2.9% of tweets. The results implicate that bots tweeted differently from non-bot accounts in terms of the volume and frequency of tweeting, the way handling the content of tweets, as well as preferences in article selection. In the meanwhile, their behavioral patterns may not be the same as Twitter bots in another context. This study contributes to the literature by enriching the understanding of automated accounts in the process of scholarly communication and demonstrating the potentials of bot-related studies in altmetrics research.