Academics can now use the web and the social websites to disseminate scholarly information in a variety of different ways. Although some scholars have taken advantage of these new online opportunities, it is not clear how widespread their uptake is or how much impact they can have. This study assesses the extent to which successful scientists have social web presences, focusing on one influential group: highly cited researchers working at European institutions. It also assesses the impact of these presences. We manually and systematically identified if the European highly cited researchers had profiles in Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Mendeley, Academia and LinkedIn or any content in SlideShare. We then used URL mentions and altmetric indicators to assess the impact of the web presences found. Although most of the scientists had an institutional website of some kind, few had created a profile in any social website investigated, and LinkedIn -the only non-academic site in the list -was the most popular. Scientists having one kind of social web profile were more likely to have another in many cases, especially in the life sciences and engineering. In most cases it was possible to estimate the relative impact of the profiles using a readily available statistic and there were disciplinary differences in the impact of the different kinds of profiles. Most social web profiles had some evidence of uptake, if not impact; nevertheless, the value of the indicators used is unclear.

Twitter is used by a substantial minority of the populations of many countries to share short messages, sometimes including images. Nevertheless, despite some research into specific images, such as selfies, and a few news stories about specific tweeted photographs, little is known about the types of images that are routinely shared. In response, this article reports a content analysis of random samples of 800 images tweeted from the UK or USA during a week at the end of 2014. Although most images were photographs, a substantial minority were hybrid or layered image forms: phone screenshots, collages, captioned pictures, and pictures of text messages. About half were primarily of one or more people, including 10% that were selfies, but a wide variety of other things were also pictured. Some of the images were for advertising or to share a joke but in most cases the purpose of the tweet seemed to be to share the minutiae of daily lives, performing the function of chat or gossip, sometimes in innovative ways.

Whilst representations of old age and older people in traditional media have been well documented, examinations of such representations within social media discourse are still scarce. This is an unfortunate omission because of the importance of social media for communication in contemporary society. In this study, we combine content analysis and discourse analysis to explore patterns of representation on Twitter around the terms ageing, old age, older people and elderly with a sample of 1,200 tweets. Our analysis shows that ‘personal concerns/views’ and ‘health and social care’ are the predominant overall topics, although some topics are clearly linked with specific keywords. The language often used in the tweets seems to reinforce negative discourses of age and ageing that locate older adults as a disempowered, vulnerable and homogeneous group; old age is deemed a problem and ageing is considered something that needs to be resisted, slowed or disguised. These topics and discursive patterns are indeed similar to those found in empirical studies of social perceptions and traditional media portrayal of old age, which indicates that social media and Twitter in particular appears to serve as an online platform that reproduces and reinforces existing ageist discourses in traditional media that feed into social perceptions of ageing and older people.

This study compares Spanish and UK research in eight subject fields using a range of bibliometric and social media indicators. For each field, lists of Spanish and UK journal articles published in the year 2012 and their citation counts were extracted from Scopus. The software Webometric Analyst was then used to extract a range of altmetrics for these articles, including patent citations, online presentation mentions, online course syllabus mentions, Wikipedia mentions and Mendeley reader counts and Altmetric.com was used to extract Twitter mentions. Results show that Mendeley is the altmetric source with the highest coverage, with 80% of sampled articles having one or more Mendeley readers, followed by Twitter (34%). The coverage of the remaining sources was lower than 3%. All of the indicators checked either have too little data or increase the overall difference between Spain and the UK and so none can be suggested as alternatives to reduce the bias against Spain in traditional citation indexes.

The Web is not only the main scholarly communication tool but also an important source of additional information about the individual researchers, their scientific and academic activities and their formally and informally published results. The aim of this study is to investigate whether successful scientists use their personal websites to disseminate their work and career details and to know which specific contents are provided on those sites, in order to check if they could be used in research evaluation. The presence of the highly cited researchers working at European institutions were analysed, a group clearly biased towards senior male researchers working in large countries (United Kingdom and Germany). Results show that about two thirds of them have a personal website, specially the scientists from Denmark, Israel and the United Kingdom. The most frequent disciplines in those websites are economics, mathematics, computer sciences and space sciences, which probably reflect the success of Open Access subject repositories like RepEc, Arxiv or CiteSeerX. Other pieces of information analysed from the websites include personal and contact data, past experience and description of expertise, current activities and lists of the author's scientific papers. Indicators derived from most of these items can be used for developing a portfolio with evaluation purposes, but the overall availability of them in the population analysed is not representative enough by now for achieving that objective. Reasons for that insufficient coverage and suggestions for improvement are discussed.

Promoting health-related campaigns on Twitter has increasingly become a world-wide choice to raise awareness and disseminate health information. Data retrieved from Twitter are now being used to explore how users express their views, attitudes and personal experiences of health-related issues. We focused on Twitter discourse reproduced during Mental Health Awareness Week 2017 by examining 1,200 tweets containing the keywords 'mental health', 'mental illness', 'mental disorders' and '#MHAW'. The analysis revealed 'awareness and advocacy', 'stigmatization', and 'personal experience of mental health/illness' as the central discourses within the sample. The article concludes with some recommendations for future research on digitally-mediated health communication.

Purpose-This study explores the link creating behaviour of European highly cited scientists based upon their online lists of publications and their institutional personal websites. Methods-A total of 1,525 highly cited scientists working at European institutions were first identified. Outlinks from their online lists of publications and their personal websites pointing to a pre-defined collection of popular academic websites and file types were then gathered by a personal web crawler. Findings-Perhaps surprisingly, a larger proportion of social scientists provided at least one outlink compared to the other disciplines investigated. By far the most linked-to file type was PDF and the most linked-to type of target website was scholarly databases, especially the Digital Object Identifier website. Health science and life science researchers mainly linked to scholarly databases, while scientists from engineering, hard sciences and social sciences linked to a wider range of target websites. Both book sites and social network sites were rarely linked to, especially the former. Hence, whilst successful researchers frequently use the Web to point to online copies of their articles, there are major disciplinary and other differences in how they do this. Research limitations-The number of women in the sample is very low, and the sample inherits any discipline-bias and language-bias of the database used (ISIHighlyCited.com) for the identification of the scientists. For part of the analysis, we did not analyze all links created by the scientists, but only outlinks pointing to specific types of websites that were common hyperlink targets from researchers' web pages. Practical implications-The differences found in the way that scientists use the web to publicize research will inform the design of future web based research evaluation and open access indicators so that they can be sensitive to different but valid strategies for web research publicity. The understanding of how successful scientists use the web to publicize their research and which web resources have the most success in each discipline will also help current researchers to plan and evaluate their own web strategies. Originality/value-This is the first study to analyse the outlinking patterns of highly cited researchers' institutional web presences in order to identify which web resources they use to provide access to their publications.

Background: International nursing research comparisons can give a new perspective on a nation's output by identifying strengths and weaknesses.