The Anatomy of a Scientific Rumor | RDL Research Database

Abstract

The announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle at CERN will be remembered as one of the milestones of the scientific endeavor of the 21st century. In this paper we present a study of information spreading processes on Twitter before, during and after the announcement of the discovery of a new particle with the features of the elusive Higgs boson on 4th July 2012. We report evidence for non-trivial spatio-temporal patterns in user activities at individual and global level, such as tweeting, re-tweeting and replying to existing tweets. We provide a possible explanation for the observed time-varying dynamics of user activities during the spreading of this scientific “rumor”. We model the information spreading in the corresponding network of individuals who posted a tweet related to the Higgs boson discovery. Finally, we show that we are able to reproduce the global behavior of about 500,000 individuals with remarkable accuracy.

MeSH Terms

AlgorithmsComputer SimulationHumansInformation DisseminationModelsTheoreticalSocial MediaSpatio-Temporal AnalysisTime Factors

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Publication Info

Year: 2013
Type: article
Volume: 3
Issue: 1
Pages: 2980-2980
Citations: 259
Access: Closed

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APA Style

                            
                                
                                    M. De Domenico, 
                                
                                    Lima A, 
                                
                                    P. Mougel
                                
                                et al.
                            
                            (2013). 
                            The Anatomy of a Scientific Rumor. 
                            Scientific Reports
                            , 3
                            (1)
                            , 2980-2980.
                            https://doi.org/10.1038/srep02980
                        

Identifiers

DOI: 10.1038/srep02980
PMID: 24135961
PMCID: PMC3798885
arXiv: 1301.2952

Data Quality

Data completeness: 84%