Previous studies have developed different categorizations of Twitter users who interact with scientific publications online, reflecting the difficulty in creating a unified approach. Using Cochrane Review meta-analysis to analyse earlier research (including 79,014 Twitter users, over twenty million tweets, and over five million tweeted publications from 23 studies), we created a consolidated robust categorization consisting of 11 user categories, at different dimensions, covering most of any future needs for user categorizations on Twitter and possibly also other social media platforms. Our findings showed, with moderate certainty, covering all the earlier different approaches employed, that the predominant group of Twitter was individual users (66%), being responsible for the majority of tweets (55%) and tweeted publications (50%), while organizations (22%, 27%, and 28%, respectively) and science communicators (16%, 13%, and 30%) clearly contributed to a lesser degree. These individual users consisted of both academic individuals (33%) and other individuals (28%). While academic individuals shared more academic publications than other individuals (42% vs. 31%), they posted fewer tweets overall (22% vs. 30%), but these differences do not reach statistical significance. Despite significant heterogeneity arising from variations in earlier categorizations, the findings consistently indicate the importance of academics in disseminating academic publications on Twitter.

翻译：先前研究针对在线上与科学出版物互动的推特用户提出了不同的分类方法，这反映了建立统一分类法的困难。我们采用科克伦系统回顾荟萃分析方法分析了早期研究（涵盖来自23项研究的79,014名推特用户、超过两千万条推文及超过五百万条被推特的出版物），构建了一个稳健的统合分类体系，包含11个用户类别及多个维度，可覆盖未来在推特（可能也包括其他社交媒体平台）上对用户分类的大多数需求。我们的研究结果以中等可信度表明，在所有早期采用的不同方法中，推特的主要群体是个人用户（66%），他们贡献了大部分推文（55%）和被推特出版物（50%），而组织机构（分别占22%、27%和28%）和科学传播者（分别占16%、13%和30%）的贡献明显较少。这些个人用户包括学术个人用户（33%）和其他个人用户（28%）。虽然学术个人用户分享的学术出版物数量多于其他个人用户（42%对31%），但他们发布的推文总数较少（22%对30%），但这些差异未达到统计学显著性。尽管早期分类差异导致显著的异质性，但研究结果一致表明学术人员在推特上传播学术出版物方面具有重要性。