Not necessarily absolutely correct. For instance,it’s feasible that some people discovered themselves unable to attend a conference but nevertheless seem on a list of delegates; other folks may possibly have registered late and do not seem on such a list; yet others may have requested not to have their names seem on a public list. Furthermore,not all SCIO-469 participants attend all readily available sessions of a conference. Nevertheless,even though there is an inevitable uncertainty within the metric,the product of conference participants and conference duration does seem to provide a affordable measure from the size of an event. Thankfully,as might be seen in “Results” section,an uncertainty in participant quantity as significant as (which might be viewed as getting unduly pessimistic) turns out not to influence the conclusions. The conferences within this sample ranged in size from participants at 1 extreme to participants at the other. An analysis showed no partnership in between the amount of participants and also the amount of twitter activity.Conference hashtagsTwo applications have been written to harvest tweets that contained a conference hashtag or connected keyword: one program applied 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 better suited for singular searches. Twitter itself states that the Search API is not a full index of all tweets,and investigation by GonzalezBailon et al. shows that the Search API “overrepresents the much more central customers and does not give an precise picture of peripheral activity”. Nevertheless,in initial tests aimed at harvesting conferencebased tweets,the plan based around the Search API was discovered to be much more robust. In unique,for conferences where Twitter activity was low,the Streaming API harvested fewer tweets (due primarily to timeout concerns) than the Search API. However,each and every tweet identified by the Streaming API was also identified by the Search API. As a result,the selection was made to harvest conference tweets using the Search API. Some conference delegates could pick to tweet from the occasion without having making use of a hashtag or keyword,and such contenteven if it have been straight relevant to the conferencewould be invisible towards the harvesting program. By the same token,even so,the same content material could be difficult to determine for other users. It’s probably,consequently,that the amount of such untagged tweets will likely be smaller in comparison with the number labelled having a conference hashtag. It should also be noted that there is certainly degeneracy amongst hashtag usage: unique conferences legitimately employ the same hashtag. As a way to minimise the likelihood of harvesting inappropriate tweets,the search on a specific hashtag or keyword was limited for the dates on which the relevant conference was held. For example,the hashtag #isb was employed by a conference organised by the International Society of Biomechanics but additionally for one particular organised by the International Society of Bassists (and pretty possibly by many other societies); limiting the search for the dates on which conferences were held was a way of minimising this effect,at PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21383499 the expense of missing out on pre and postconference tweets. There were also occasions on which the usage of a hashtag was contested through an occasion. By way of example,#pathways would have already been a legitimate hashtag for probably the most Twitteractive conferences within this sample,“Pathways Towards Habitable PlanetsII”. Indeed,this certain hashtag was.