How do scientific papers from different journal tiers gain attention on social media?

The emergence of social media has fundamentally changed the way of scholarly communication and allows for scientific research to be shared at an unprecedented speed and scale. While many studies have discussed what papers attract most online attention, how they prevail online is unclear. In this paper, we explore the diffusion patterns of ∼170,000 papers with different journal tiers from 2012 to 2019 based on over 3 million Twitter mentions. We first categorize journals by the elite (the top of Q1) and non-elite (Q2∼Q4) according to their journal impact factor quartiles, then use network analysis and time series analysis to characterize papers’ dynamic diffusion process, and finally discuss papers’ engaged users and disciplinary contexts. Results show that though elite journal papers spread significantly faster and more broadly than non-elite, some non-elite journal papers reached a sizable audience. For non-elite journal papers, a decent size of social media reach can be achieved through the aid of highly influential users or multiple waves of small spread that span a long period. As a result, popular non-elite journal papers tend to be more viral than the elite, focusing discussions around topics close to daily life. This study provides a new perspective to characterize the diffusion process of scientific papers and helps to further enhance the understanding of such a process.