Social Media and Academic Impact: Do Early Tweets Correlate with Future Citations?

Abstract

Objective: Determine whether social media platforms can influence article impact as measured by citations. Methods: Cross-sectional study that analyzed articles published in the top 10 otolaryngology journals by Eigenfactor score in January 2015. Total accumulated Twitter mentions and citations were recorded in 2021. The main outcomes examined the difference in citations, tweets, article types, and author counts accumulated over a 5-year period for all articles that were either tweeted or nontweeted. Results: A total of 3094 articles were included for analysis. The average article was cited 11.2 ± 13.2 times and tweeted 2.10 ± 4.0 times. Sixty-four percent of the articles had at least one tweet. Over the study period, there was a statistically significant difference in mean number of citations between tweeted articles (12.1 ± 15.0) versus nontweeted articles (9.6 ± 10.5) citations, representing a 26% difference ( P < .001). Review articles had the highest mean citations (19.4 ± 23.4) while editorials had the lowest mean citations (2.8 ± 6.9). Tweets peaked in the year of publication, but citations continued to rise in the subsequent years. Tweeted articles’ peak citation rate change was +1.27 mean citations per year, compared to +0.99 mean citations per year in nontweeted articles. The mean author count in tweeted articles (5.40 ± 3.1) was not significantly different than the mean author count in nontweeted articles (5.19 ± 2.65, P = .0794). Conclusion: These data suggest a moderate correlation between tweets and article citations, but a clear difference in the number of citations in articles tweeted versus those with no tweets. Thus, dissemination of knowledge may be impacted by social medial platforms such as Twitter.

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“…However, a study investigating the association between web-based metrics and citation-based metrics revealed a statistically significant and positive correlation ( r = 0.32) between the AAS and the citation rate of 496 articles published in five major orthopaedic journals in 2016 [ 8 ]. Similar relationships between web-based metrics and citation-based metrics have already been demonstrated in other fields of medical research [ 3 , 14 ].…”

Zwitschernder Elfenbeinturm – Eine Laienperspektive zum Gebrauch sozialer Medien in der Wissenschaft

“…Hierbei wurden häufig getweetete Artikel teils bis zu 11-mal wahrscheinlicher zitiert (Eysenbach, 2011;Vaghjiani et al, 2021). Über Zitationen hinaus gewinnen in den vergangenen Jahren überdies die sogenannten Altmetrics verstärkt an Relevanz für die wissenschaftliche Leistungsbewertung (Piwowar & Priem, 2013;Warren et al, 2017) und somit auch für Karrierepotentiale von Nachwuchswissenschaftler*innen.…”

Predicting citation impact from altmetric attention in clinical and translational research: Do big splashes lead to ripple effects?

“…Articles that elicit early nonacademic attention may be more likely to be noticed by other researchers, which could increase the likelihood that the research will be applied and cited in subsequent research. Indeed, past research in numerous fields has investigated the relationship between altmetric scores and citation counts and found little to no association 6–10 . However, no previous research has focused on this relationship in clinical/translational research, which aims to advance discoveries across boundaries from basic science to public use.…”

“…Indeed, past research in numerous fields has investigated the relationship between altmetric scores and citation counts and found little to no association. 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 However, no previous research has focused on this relationship in clinical/translational research, which aims to advance discoveries across boundaries from basic science to public use. Dissemination across academic silos and across phases of the translational spectrum is expected to facilitate the interdisciplinary cross‐pollination that is key to translational goals.…”