Gathering information from social media content is becoming increasingly popular. Twitter, a microblog where posts are limited to 140 characters, is an excellent platform for gathering instant and interactive information. Considerable research has focused on Twitter’s effectiveness for disseminating emergency alerts and confirming the safety of acquaintances. However, there has been less emphasis on the analysis of Twitter posts to obtain information specialized to specific domains. Such analysis could enable simple and rapid identification of information related to state-of-the-art technology. Against this background, this study reports on a preliminary analysis of tweets by Japanese academic researchers. Our content analysis and text analysis reveal that many academic researchers tweet about their individual activities, education, or research. Their tweets contain domain-specific knowledge and have identifiable textual characteristics. This study provides basic findings that can be applied to obtain domain-specific knowledge from Twitter.
