Not necessarily completely precise. As an example,it is actually feasible that a number of people located themselves unable to attend a conference but nevertheless seem on a list of delegates; other people may well have registered late and don’t appear on such a list; however others might have requested not to have their names seem on a public list. Furthermore,not all participants attend all available sessions of a conference. Nevertheless,though there’s an inevitable uncertainty in the metric,the solution of conference participants and conference duration does seem to supply a affordable measure from the size of an event. Thankfully,as will probably be noticed in “Results” section,an uncertainty in participant quantity as significant as (which might be viewed as becoming unduly pessimistic) turns out not to influence the conclusions. The conferences within this sample ranged in size from participants at one particular intense to participants at the other. An analysis showed no partnership between the number of participants along with the level of twitter activity.Conference hashtagsTwo programs had been written to harvest tweets that contained a conference hashtag or connected keyword: a single program utilised a Search API,the other a Streaming API. The latter API keeps a persistent http connection open; the former calls for the polling of a rest endpoint,but is probably superior suited for singular searches. Twitter itself states that the Search API will not be a total index of all tweets,and analysis by GonzalezBailon et al. shows that the Search API “overrepresents the more central customers and will not supply an accurate image of peripheral activity”. Nonetheless,in initial tests aimed at harvesting conferencebased tweets,the plan primarily based on the Search API was found to become far more robust. In distinct,for conferences exactly where Twitter activity was low,the Streaming API harvested fewer tweets (due mostly to timeout challenges) than the Search API. On the other hand,each and every tweet identified by the Streaming API was also identified by the Search API. For that reason,the decision was produced to harvest conference tweets making use of the Search API. Some conference delegates could opt for to tweet in the occasion without making use of a hashtag or keyword,and such contenteven if it were straight relevant towards the conferencewould be invisible towards the harvesting program. By precisely the same token,on the other hand,the exact same content material could be tough to identify for other users. It is actually likely,consequently,that the amount of such untagged tweets will be smaller compared to the quantity labelled with a conference hashtag. It need to also be noted that there is certainly degeneracy amongst hashtag usage: unique conferences legitimately employ the same hashtag. So as to minimise the likelihood of harvesting inappropriate tweets,the search on a particular hashtag or keyword was restricted to the dates on which the relevant conference was held. For example,the hashtag #isb was used by a conference organised by the International Society of Biomechanics but also for a single organised by the International Society of Bassists (and pretty possibly by several other societies); limiting the search to the dates on which conferences were held was a way of minimising this impact,at PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21383499 the expense of A-196 chemical information missing out on pre and postconference tweets. There had been also occasions on which the use of a hashtag was contested throughout an occasion. One example is,#pathways would happen to be a reputable hashtag for one of the most Twitteractive conferences within this sample,“Pathways Towards Habitable PlanetsII”. Certainly,this unique hashtag was.