Singing the donut blues: Creating a SoMe echo chamber to boost the scores on Altmetric

Can we color in the Altmetric donut by using a social media echo chamber, and does that manipulation lead to actual engagement with the work? Recently, a university professor told us every time she published she would tweet and re-tweet the DOI of her publication. To inflate her own Altmetric score she had created a series of artificial social media profiles “engaging” with her work. This peaked our curiosity and so we made a small-scale experiment. We encouraged our colleagues and the conference participants at LIBER 2019 to tweet and re-tweet the DOI of a letter to the editor describing our experiment published in LIBER Quarterly. The interest in our experiment spiraled out beyond our usual network. For every tweet we increased our score. But no matter how much we tried we did not manage to make it spread to other SoMe platforms than twitter and our donut has remained blue (the color of tweets). We tried again and again to obtain scores from Youtube, Google+, various blogs, but had no success. Our overall theoretical framework for this work is Roger’s diffusion of innovations theory. We will use this theory to explain both the success (many tweets) and the failures (on other platforms) of our experiment. Our poster is richly illustrated with maps how the DOI was tweeted and retweeted and examples of SoMe platforms where we were less successful and all of it set within the framework of our theoretical approach.