Communities of shared interests and cognitive bridges: the case of the anti-vaccination movement on Twitter

This paper presents an analysis of the anti-vaccination movement’s referencing of research articles on the topic of vaccination in the social media network Twitter. Drawing on the concept of bibliographic coupling, the paper demonstrates how Twitter users can be coupled based on articles mentioned on Twitter. The sample applied consists of 113 open access journal articles. The combination of tweeter coupling with the respective stance of Twitter accounts vis-à-vis vaccination makes possible the creation of a network graph of tweeters mentioning this corpus of articles. In addition to a common interest in the scientific literature, the findings show distinct communities of shared interests within the anti-vaccination movement, and demonstrate that tweeter coupling can be used to map these distinctive interests. The emergence of Twitter accounts serving as cognitive bridges within and between communities is noted and discussed with regard to their relative positions in the network. This paper’s results extend the knowledge on the application of altmetric data to study the interests of non-scientific publics in science; more specifically, it adds to the understanding of the potentials of open science and science–society interactions arising from increased access by non-scientists to scientific publications.