Doubts have been cast over new research that claims women are responsible for half of misogynistic abuse online in the form of tweets containing the words "slut" and "whore".

The Demos social media study monitored the use of the terms by UK Twitter users over a three-week period and found women were just as likely as men to tweet abuse.

But that could be misleading, according to Australia's RMIT research fellow specialising in feminist theory and gender inequality Meagan Tyler, who says because Twitter users are a minimum age of 13, the figure included the high amount of online abuse slung between teenage girls.

"In other studies that have focused specifically on people under 18, they have found a similar breakdown with girls and boys. Online abuse among teenage girls is quite high," she told the ABC.

"[Also] because there has been this focus in this study to focus on 'slut' and 'whore', we know they are often terms used by teenage girls."

She said rolling in girls with women was a problem, because men's abuse of women was much more prevalent than the study implied.

"What if we look at rape or death threats or men threatening to shove something up women in sexual violence? Not a lot of women are threatening to rape other women online," Dr Tyler said.

The study found 6,500 unique users were targeted by 10,000 explicitly aggressive and misogynistic tweets.

Internationally, more than 200,000 aggressive tweets using the same terms were sent to 80,000 people in the same timeframe.

Algorithms separated tweets from those that used explicitly aggressive ways to those that used instances of self-identification or in a more conversational tone relating to uses like "slut-shaming".

The research builds on a study from the same group in 2014 which found "slut" and "whore" dominated misogynistic language on Twitter.

'Women' accounts may be run by men: Ford

Feminist and writer Clementine Ford, known to receive a copious amount of abuse on social media, said the research may be flawed because the account verification process had not been explained.

"It would be interesting to know how many of these accounts were verified to belong to actual women," she told the ABC.

"I'm well aware that women employ the language of patriarchy against each other in order to negotiate some form of nominal power, but there is also a rising practice of men creating 'sock accounts' in which they pose as women in order to make it seem like this isn't a gendered problem."

Demos told the ABC gender was detected "using a natural language processing classifier, developed by the University of Sussex, which looks at the user account which sent the tweet, taking aspects including their username, name and description into account."

Women slut-shame to 'get one up'

Despite casting doubt over the study's findings, Dr Tyler said there was evidence to show women slut-shamed one another, but for different reasons to men targeting women.

"In terms of women's abuse of other women it's best understood under the framework of horizontal violence," she said.

"Groups that are oppressed or marginalised, whether that be based on race, socio-economic background or gender or whatever, are more likely to lash out at each other.

"It's kind of away of saying 'I'm not like that' … it's a way to get one up on another woman to raise yourself in the hierarchy."

She said this differed from men who abused women, who were instead "reinforcing a position of dominance, reminding women where their place is".

Australian research from RMIT University from 2015 found victims of online harassment and abuse were both male and female, with women twice as likely to be targeted by male offenders and men also twice as likely to be the perpetrators of digital abuse.