‘Excited to see our latest work published’: Recontextualizing research results in biomedical tweetorials

Abstract

Tweetorials, long Twitter threads to communicate complex concepts, are becoming increasingly popular among medical experts. While a few studies have analyzed tweetorials which serve to communicate scientific information to a general audience, no attention has been paid to how tweetorials are used to report on and publicize research and results published in an article or preprint. In this study move analysis was conducted to analyze a corpus of 50 such biomedical publication-promoting tweetorials, in order to understand how the paper/preprint is recontextualized in this online genre. The analysis reveals that the moves in these tweetorials work together to draw attention to the publication and highlight the key findings and contributions. In addition to moves adapted from the research article, tweetorials incorporate some moves and steps intended to attract and engage the readers. The way these moves are realized is determined by the (semi-)expert audience, the promotional purpose of the genre, and the affordances of the medium. Features typical of the research article are combined with resources intended to create intimacy and solidarity and make authors more visible. The results suggest that these tweetorials are a suitable tool for researchers to promote their work and meet the challenges of the attention economy.