Evaluating the Comprehensiveness of Twitter Search API Results: A Four Step Method

• Mike Thelwall ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Wolverhampton

     University of Wolverhampton

     GB.ENG.Q3.41UF, Reino Unido

     
• Localización: Cybermetrics: International Journal of Scientometrics, Informetrics and Bibliometrics, ISSN-e 1137-5019, Nº. 18-19, 2015
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • The Twitter Search API (Applications Programming Interface) is a free service that allows software to automatically submit searches to Twitter and retrieve matching tweets. It is widely used to gather tweets for social science and other research, although this is not its main purpose. It does not guarantee to be comprehensive, however, so this article introduces a simple method to check the coverage of its results for narrowly focused topics.

    An application of the method shows that the results are incomplete, put possibly only due to the filtering out of duplicate, potentially offensive or conversational content