Understanding Link Sharing Practice in NPM Related Tweets by Package Maintainers Community
Abstract
Twitter is a popular platform for the JavaScript community to share their opinions and thoughts. These tweets contain valuable knowledge about the Node Package Manager (NPM) ecosystem. Links are an example of such knowledge. Therefore, a thorough investigation into the role of links in tweets by NPM maintainers can reveal noteworthy trends and patterns of information dissemination. This study investigates the prevalence, targets, purposes, categories, and decay of links in tweets shared by NPM maintainers to understand how these links connect to the larger NPM ecosystem. To accomplish our goal, we conducted a mixed method analysis of 18,408 links. Our study found that links are prevalent in tweets and majority of the tweets are related to package management. The links are mostly blog posts, tutorials, and articles, and their primary function is to provide tweet context. Surprisingly, 80% of the links are unique, while repeatedly mentioned links make up one-fifth (20%). In addition, github.com was the most frequent domain other than twitter.com, and approximately 770 (5%) of the links shared in tweets are dead. Among the dead links, the domain github.com has the highest number of these links. The results of this study indicate that referencing external resources using links is prevalent practice for the NPM maintainers community on Twitter space. In addition, we identified some research gaps and open challenges that can guide future research efforts.
Keywords
Documentation, Link, NPM Maintainer, Tweet
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
I. Jahan Reshma, A. Shahriur, Y. Nugroho, S. Kumar, D. Gunawan and S. Islam, "Understanding Link Sharing Practice in NPM Related Tweets by Package Maintainers Community," in Journal of Communications Software and Systems, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 244-256, June 2026, doi: https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2025-0175
@article{jahan-reshma2026understandinglink,
author = {Israt Jahan Reshma and Asfak Shahriur and Yusuf Sulistyo Nugroho and Shuvroto Kumar and Dedi Gunawan and Syful Islam},
title = {Understanding Link Sharing Practice in NPM Related Tweets by Package Maintainers Community},
journal = {Journal of Communications Software and Systems},
month = {6},
year = {2026},
volume = {22},
number = {2},
pages = {244--256},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2025-0175},
url = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2025-0175}
}