To provide some context for the potential engagement behavior of Twitter users around science, this article investigates how Bitly short links to scientific publications embedded in scholarly Twitter mentions are clicked on Twitter. Based on the click metrics of over 1.1 million Bitly short links referring to Web of Science (WoS) publications, our results show that around 49.5% of them were not clicked by Twitter users. For those Bitly short links with clicks from Twitter, the majority of their Twitter clicks accumulated within a short period of time after they were first tweeted. Bitly short links to the publications in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities tend to attract more clicks from Twitter over other subject fields. This article also assesses the extent to which Twitter clicks are correlated with some other impact indicators. Twitter clicks are weakly correlated with scholarly impact indicators (WoS citations and Mendeley readers), but moderately correlated to other Twitter engagement indicators (total retweets and total likes). In light of these results, we highlight the importance of paying more attention to the click metrics of URLs in scholarly Twitter mentions, to improve our understanding about the more effective dissemination and reception of science information on Twitter.

中文翻译：

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Twitter 上的科学是如何被点击的？单击指向科学出版物的 Bitly 短链接的指标

为了为 Twitter 用户围绕科学的潜在参与行为提供一些背景信息，本文调查了在 Twitter 上点击了嵌入在学术 Twitter 提及中的科学出版物的 Bitly 短链接的情况。根据引用 Web of Science (WoS) 出版物的超过 110 万个 Bitly 短链接的点击指标，我们的结果显示，其中大约 49.5% 的链接未被 Twitter 用户点击。对于那些从 Twitter 获得点击的 Bitly 短链接，他们的大部分 Twitter 点击是在第一次发布推文后的短时间内积累的。与其他学科领域相比，指向社会科学和人文领域出版物的短链接往往会吸引更多来自 Twitter 的点击。本文还评估了 Twitter 点击与其他一些影响指标的相关程度。Twitter 点击次数与学术影响指标（WoS 引用和 Mendeley 读者）的相关性较弱，但与其他 Twitter 参与度指标（转推总数和喜欢总数）中等相关。鉴于这些结果，我们强调了在学术 Twitter 提及中更多关注 URL 点击指标的重要性，以提高我们对更有效地在 Twitter 上传播和接收科学信息的理解。