Not necessarily entirely accurate. One example is,it can be attainable that a lot of people identified themselves unable to attend a conference but nonetheless seem on a list of delegates; others could have registered late and usually do not appear on such a list; yet other individuals might have requested not to have their names seem on a public list. Moreover,not all participants attend all offered sessions of a conference. Nevertheless,though there is certainly an inevitable uncertainty inside the metric,the item of conference participants and conference duration does appear to supply a affordable measure from the size of an occasion. Fortunately,as will probably be seen in “Results” section,an uncertainty in participant number as huge as (which may be viewed as being unduly pessimistic) turns out not to impact the conclusions. The conferences within this sample ranged in size from participants at 1 extreme to participants at the other. An evaluation showed no relationship among the number of participants and the amount of twitter activity.Conference hashtagsTwo applications have been written to harvest tweets that contained a conference hashtag or connected keyword: one system utilised a Search API,the other a Streaming API. The latter API keeps a persistent http connection open; the former needs the polling of a rest endpoint,but is maybe greater suited for singular searches. Twitter itself states that the Search API just isn’t a comprehensive index of all tweets,and investigation by GonzalezBailon et al. shows that the Search API “overrepresents the extra central customers and does not offer you an correct picture of peripheral activity”. Nonetheless,in initial tests aimed at harvesting conferencebased tweets,the system based around the Search API was located to be a lot more robust. In distinct,for conferences where Twitter activity was low,the Streaming API harvested fewer tweets (due mostly to timeout troubles) than the Search API. On the other hand,each and every tweet identified by the Streaming API was also identified by the Search API. As a result,the selection was produced to harvest conference tweets applying the Search API. Some conference delegates could opt for to tweet from the occasion without the need of applying a hashtag or keyword,and such contenteven if it were directly relevant towards the conferencewould be invisible to the harvesting plan. By exactly the same token,nevertheless,the identical content material would be hard to identify for other users. It is actually probably,as a result,that the number of such untagged tweets will be tiny in comparison with the quantity labelled having a conference hashtag. It should also be noted that there is degeneracy purchase SGI-7079 amongst hashtag usage: various conferences legitimately employ exactly the same hashtag. As a way to minimise the likelihood of harvesting inappropriate tweets,the search on a certain hashtag or keyword was restricted to the dates on which the relevant conference was held. By way of example,the hashtag #isb was made use of by a conference organised by the International Society of Biomechanics but in addition for one organised by the International Society of Bassists (and fairly possibly by a number of other societies); limiting the search to the dates on which conferences had been held was a way of minimising this impact,at PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21383499 the expense of missing out on pre and postconference tweets. There have been also occasions on which the use of a hashtag was contested during an event. As an example,#pathways would have been a legitimate hashtag for probably the most Twitteractive conferences in this sample,“Pathways Towards Habitable PlanetsII”. Indeed,this specific hashtag was.