Formal citations are important, but it’s the informal interactions that really power the scientific conversation. Impactstory helps our users observe these. And since Monday, they’ve been able to observe them a lot more clearly: adding Twitter data from Altmetric.com has significantly improved our coverage, to the point where we’re confident saying Impactstory is most comprehensive source of scholar-level Twitter data in the world.

We wanted to play with all this data a little, so we thought it’d be fun to find the three most tweeted scholars on Impactstory.  Congrats to Ethan White, Ruibang Luo, and Brian Nosek: y’all are the Most Tweeted, with nearly 1000 tweets each mentioning your research papers, preprints, and datasets!

But of course, while these numbers are impressive they’re far from the whole story. By diving into the content of individual tweets, we can learn a lot more.

For instance, Ethan posted a grant proposal on figshare. This isn’t a traditional paper; it’s not even cited (yet). It’s not helping Ethan’s h-index. But it is making an impact, and looking at Twitter can help us see how. Zooming in, we can find this take from @ATredennick, a PhD candidate in ecology at Colorado State:

Thanks @ethanwhite for posting successful NSF proposal, http://bit.ly/MeKXsP . Very useful for early-career scientists.

That’s one tweet; there are 53 others for this product. Now we’re looking beyond simple counts and starting to tell data-driven stories–stories we’d never see otherwise.

Right now we’re only linking to a subset of tweets for each product, but we’re working to add the ability to see all of ‘em. We’re also going to be bringing data about tweet locations and authors (are you being tweeted by a fellow scientist? a blogger? your labmates?) right into your profile. If you’ve got other ideas for Twitter features, let us know!

In the meantime: congrats again to Brian, Ruibang, and Ethan! We’ll be sending them each a swag bag with an Impactstory “I am more than my h-index” tshirt, and stickers featuring our new logo.

Want to find who’s tweeting your science? Make your profile to find out!