The traditional bibliometric techniques gauge the research impact through citation-based quantitative indices. However, due to citation lag time, it may take years to address the impact of an article. This paper seeks to measure an early impact of research articles using tweet sentiments associated with them. We claim that the papers cited in positive and neutral tweets have a higher impact than those not cited or cited in negative tweets. Accordingly, we use SentiStrenth, and we improve it by incorporating new opinion bearing words of scientific domain in its sentiment lexicons. Then, we classify the sentiment of 6,482,260 tweets linked to 1,083,535 publications covered by Altmetric.com. By using positive and negative tweets as an independent variable and the citation count as the dependent variable, the linear regression analysis shows a weak positive prediction of high citation counts across 16 broad disciplines in Scopus. By introducing an additional indicator, i.e. 'number of unique Twitter users,' the regression model improves the adjusted R-squared value of regression analysis in several disciplines. Overall, the encouraging positive correlation between the tweet sentiments and citations show that Twitterbased opinion may be exploited as a complementary indicator for predicting literature's early impact.
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