How visible are the research of different countries: an analysis of global vs. local reach of WoS publications on Twitter

The country of authors of 5,9 million Web of Science (WoS) publications with DOI from the years 2012 to 2015 have been compared with the country of Twitter users tweeting these WoS publications in order to study the main scholarly users of Twitter across 10 different countries. For this purpose, the visibility of country’s publications in the WoS and geographical distribution of Twitter users tweeting WoS publications have been analysed. The aim is to study how do they differ and what are their preference in tweeting their own vs. other country’s publication. The findings show that in general, US and UK with the highest proportion of outputs in the WoS, are among the main users of Twitter as well. Moreover, except for US, users tweet publications affiliated to other country more than those from their own country. Also, similar to WoS, it seems that altmetric providers are not free of international biases in their coverage and collection of metrics. Finally, various possible reasons on why publications from some countries attract more Twitter users than others have been discussed.