Not necessarily absolutely accurate. As an example,it really is probable that a lot of people identified themselves unable to attend a conference but nevertheless appear on a list of delegates; other people might have registered late and don’t seem on such a list; however other individuals may possibly have requested not to have their names appear on a public list. In addition,not all participants attend all out there sessions of a conference. Nevertheless,though there is certainly an inevitable uncertainty within the metric,the item of conference participants and conference duration does appear to supply a reasonable measure of the size of an event. Thankfully,as will likely be observed in “Results” section,an uncertainty in participant quantity as massive as (which may be viewed as getting unduly pessimistic) turns out to not have an effect on the conclusions. The conferences in this sample ranged in size from participants at 1 intense to participants at the other. An analysis showed no connection in between the amount of participants and also the degree of twitter activity.Conference hashtagsTwo applications had been written to harvest tweets that contained a conference hashtag or associated keyword: 1 system applied a Search API,the other a Streaming API. The latter API keeps a persistent http connection open; the former requires the polling of a rest endpoint,but is probably better suited for singular searches. Twitter itself states that the Search API isn’t a complete index of all tweets,and study by GonzalezBailon et al. shows that the Search API “overrepresents the additional central customers and does not offer an correct image of peripheral activity”. Nevertheless,in initial tests aimed at harvesting conferencebased tweets,the system based around the Search API was found to be far more robust. In specific,for conferences exactly where Twitter activity was low,the Streaming API harvested fewer tweets (due mostly to timeout challenges) than the Search API. Alternatively,just about every tweet identified by the Streaming API was also identified by the Search API. Thus,the choice was order Fumarate hydratase-IN-2 (sodium salt) created to harvest conference tweets utilizing the Search API. Some conference delegates could pick to tweet in the occasion without the need of working with a hashtag or keyword,and such contenteven if it were straight relevant towards the conferencewould be invisible to the harvesting program. By precisely the same token,nevertheless,the exact same content material would be difficult to recognize for other customers. It can be most likely,hence,that the number of such untagged tweets is going to be compact in comparison with the quantity labelled having a conference hashtag. It really should also be noted that there is degeneracy amongst hashtag usage: distinctive conferences legitimately employ the exact same hashtag. So as to minimise the likelihood of harvesting inappropriate tweets,the search on a particular hashtag or keyword was limited towards the dates on which the relevant conference was held. One example is,the hashtag #isb was employed by a conference organised by the International Society of Biomechanics but additionally for 1 organised by the International Society of Bassists (and rather possibly by various other societies); limiting the search to the dates on which conferences had been 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 had been also occasions on which the usage of a hashtag was contested for the duration of an event. By way of example,#pathways would have already been a reputable hashtag for just about the most Twitteractive conferences within this sample,“Pathways Towards Habitable PlanetsII”. Indeed,this particular hashtag was.