Testing propositions derived from Twitter studies

Published in PLoS ONE, 2015

Recommended citation: Liang, H., & Fu, K. W. (2015). Testing propositions derived from Twitter studies: Generalization and replication in computational social science. PLoS ONE, 10(8), e0134270. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134270

Abstract

Replication is an essential requirement for scientific discovery. The current study aims to generalize and replicate 10 propositions made in previous Twitter studies using a representative dataset. Our findings suggest 6 out of 10 propositions could not be replicated due to the variations of data collection, analytic strategies employed, and inconsistent measurements. The study’s contributions are twofold: First, it systematically summarized and assessed some important claims in the field, which can inform future studies. Second, it proposed a feasible approach to generating a random sample of Twitter users and its associated ego networks, which might serve as a solution for answering social-scientific questions at the individual level without accessing the complete data archive.

Keywords

Computational social science, replicability, Twitter, random sampling

Citation

Liang, H., & Fu, K. W. (2015). Testing propositions derived from Twitter studies: Generalization and replication in computational social science. PLoS ONE, 10(8), e0134270. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134270

Replication data & code