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Analysis of institutional authors

Torregrosa, JavierAuthorPanizo-Lledot, AngelAuthorBello-Orgaz, GemaAuthorCamacho, DavidCorresponding Author

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September 7, 2020
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Analyzing the relationship between relevance and extremist discourse in an alt-right network on Twitter

Publicated to: Social Network Analysis And Mining. 10 (1): - 2020-12-01 10(1), DOI: 10.1007/s13278-020-00676-1

Authors:

Torregrosa, Javier; Panizo-Lledot, Angel; Bello-Orgaz, Gema; Camacho, David;
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Affiliations

‎ Univ Politecn Madrid, Dept Sistemas Informat, Madrid, Spain - Author

Abstract

Nowadays, Twitter is used by several political extremist groups to establish close communities on which the opinions are amplified following an echo-chamber effect. However, few literature analyses the effect of the use of an extremist discourse in relation to the relevance of these users on their online network. With the aim of analyzing this effect, this work studies the relationship between the use of indicators of extremist discourse from users belonging to an alt-right network on Twitter and their relevance on it. The network of alt-right users is created using the retweets of 96 accounts where the user relevance is measured by five different types of centrality metrics, includingin-degree,eigenvector,k-shells,betweenness, andcloseness. Both the linguistic indicators and the tone were analyzed using LIWC and VADER software. The network analysis outcomes show that user relevance on the network is indeed related to the use of an extremist discourse. Finally, this relationship is also tested on different corpus of texts and about different topics, being found that this relationship is more clear on retweets made by the users and when discussing about hate speech topics.
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Keywords

CentralityCentrality metricsFar-rightLinguisticPolitical extremismPsychologySocial network analysis

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal Social Network Analysis And Mining due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency Scopus (SJR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2020, it was in position , thus managing to position itself as a Q1 (Primer Cuartil), in the category Media Technology. Notably, the journal is positioned above the 90th percentile.

Independientemente del impacto esperado determinado por el canal de difusión, es importante destacar el impacto real observado de la propia aportación.

Según las diferentes agencias de indexación, el número de citas acumuladas por esta publicación hasta la fecha 2025-12-21:

  • WoS: 3
  • Scopus: 21
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Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-12-21:

  • The use, from an academic perspective evidenced by the Altmetric agency indicator referring to aggregations made by the personal bibliographic manager Mendeley, gives us a total of: 38.
  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 38 (PlumX).

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 7.
  • The number of mentions in news outlets: 1 (Altmetric).
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Leadership analysis of institutional authors

There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: First Author (TORREGROSA LOPEZ, FRANCISCO JAVIER) and Last Author (CAMACHO FERNANDEZ, DAVID).

the author responsible for correspondence tasks has been CAMACHO FERNANDEZ, DAVID.

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Awards linked to the item

This work has been co-funded by the following grants: Comunidad Autonoma de Madrid under grant S2018/TCS-4566 (CYNAMON: Cybersecurity, Network Analysis and Monitoring for the Next Generation Internet); Spanish Ministry of Science and Education and Competitivity (MINECO) and European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) under grant TIN2017-85727-C4-3-P (DeepBio).
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