Understanding Why <scp>WeChat</scp> Articles Mention Chinese Scholarly Papers: A Content Analysis Approach

ABSTRACT The academic community may make research findings public by mentioning Chinese scholarly papers on WeChat. However, why and how Chinese research papers were cited in WeChat articles remains unknown. This work conducted a content analysis of the motivations, emotions, forms, and elements of WeChat mentions. Data was collected from CNKI and WeChat official accounts, resulting in a dataset of 7,970 core journal papers with 21,134 WeChat mentions. Key findings include that: (1) Most of the mentions in the WeChat articles present Chinese academic publications for sharing and introduction. These mentions account for about 64%. (2) Mention sentiments are mainly neutral (around 64%). Negative emotions are almost absent. (3) In the mention forms, most WeChat articles mentioning scholarly papers do not include reference lists. They mention the papers directly in the body of the WeChat articles with recognizable elements of academic papers. (4) Concerning the mentioned elements, academic papers consist of essential content parts. They include titles (78%), abstracts (12%), and full texts (9%), and that gets the most WeChat mentions. This would give a better base and reference for advancing altmetrics in China. And it would be helpful to know the cause and how the academic papers spread on Chinese social media.