“Come along for a tweetorial!”: Recontextualization strategies in biomedical publication-promoting tweetorials

Abstract

The need to promote research and make it visible to various audiences has led to the emergence of various digital genres which seek to draw attention to research publications. Tweetorials, long Twitter threads to communicate complex concepts, are increasingly being used by medical researchers to report on and promote their own published articles and preprints, in the competive context of academic publishing. The main purpose of this article is to examine the strategies employed by researchers to recontextualize scientific discourse in these tweetorials. The analysis of a corpus of 50 biomedical publication-promoting tweetorials has revealed five categories of strategies: strategies to establish the authors’ authority and credibility; strategies to make claims and arguments convincing; strategies to engage the reader, by creating intimacy and dialogic involvement or by attracting their attention to the tweetorials; strategies to facilitate quick processing of information; and strategies to deal with space constraints. The results suggest that the recontextualization strategies used in the composition of these tweetorials are determined by the promotional purpose of the genre, the audience, the affordances and constraints of the medium, and the genre contextual features.