IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v109y2016i2d10.1007_s11192-016-2113-0.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

To be or not to be on Twitter, and its relationship with the tweeting and citation of research papers

Author

Listed:
  • José Luis Ortega

    (CCHS-CSIC)

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to understand the relationship between the diffusion and mention of research papers in Twitter according to whether their authors are members or not of that micro-blogging service. To that end, 4166 articles from 76 Twitter users and 124 from non-Twitter users were analysed. Data on Twitter mentions were extracted from PlumX Analytics, information on each Twitter user was taken from the own platform and citations were collected from Scopus public API. Results show that papers from Twitter users are 33 % more tweeted than documents of non-Twitter users. From Twitter users, the increase of followers produces 30 % more tweets. No differences were found between the citation impact (i.e. number of citations) of papers authored by Twitter users and non-Twitter users. However, the number of followers indirectly influences the citation impact. The main conclusion is that the participation on Twitter affects the dissemination of research papers, and in consequence, it indirectly favours the likelihood that academic outputs being cited.

Suggested Citation

  • José Luis Ortega, 2016. "To be or not to be on Twitter, and its relationship with the tweeting and citation of research papers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(2), pages 1353-1364, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:109:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-016-2113-0
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-016-2113-0
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-016-2113-0
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-016-2113-0?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kim Holmberg & Mike Thelwall, 2014. "Disciplinary differences in Twitter scholarly communication," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1027-1042, November.
    2. J. C. F. Winter, 2015. "The relationship between tweets, citations, and article views for PLOS ONE articles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(2), pages 1773-1779, February.
    3. Stefanie Haustein & Isabella Peters & Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Mike Thelwall & Vincent Larivière, 2014. "Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 65(4), pages 656-669, April.
    4. Rodrigo Costas & Zohreh Zahedi & Paul Wouters, 2015. "Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(10), pages 2003-2019, October.
    5. Xin Shuai & Alberto Pepe & Johan Bollen, 2012. "How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted Preprints: Article Downloads, Twitter Mentions, and Citations," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(11), pages 1-8, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. P Sage Anderson & Aubrey R Odom & Hunter M Gray & Jordan B Jones & William F Christensen & Todd Hollingshead & Joseph G Hadfield & Alyssa Evans-Pickett & Megan Frost & Christopher Wilson & Lance E Dav, 2020. "A case study exploring associations between popular media attention of scientific research and scientific citations," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(7), pages 1-15, July.
    2. Liwei Zhang & Jue Wang, 2021. "What affects publications’ popularity on Twitter?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(11), pages 9185-9198, November.
    3. Martín-Martín, Alberto & Orduna-Malea, Enrique & Delgado López-Cózar, Emilio, 2018. "Author-level metrics in the new academic profile platforms: The online behaviour of the Bibliometrics community," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(2), pages 494-509.
    4. Yu, Houqiang & Li, Longfei & Cao, Xueting & Chen, Tao, 2022. "Exploring country's preference over news mentions to academic papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(4).
    5. José Luis Ortega, 2018. "Reliability and accuracy of altmetric providers: a comparison among Altmetric.com, PlumX and Crossref Event Data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 116(3), pages 2123-2138, September.
    6. Kaltrina Nuredini, 2021. "Investigating Altmetric Information For The Top 1000 Journals From Handelsblatt Ranking In Economic And Business Studies," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(5), pages 1315-1343, December.
    7. Stephan Puehringer & Georg Wolfmayr, 2023. "Competitive Performativity of (Academic) Social Networks. The subjectivation of Competition on ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Twitter," ICAE Working Papers 150, Johannes Kepler University, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy.
    8. Liwei Zhang & Jue Wang, 2018. "Why highly cited articles are not highly tweeted? A biology case," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 117(1), pages 495-509, October.
    9. David Howoldt & Henning Kroll & Peter Neuhäusler & Alexander Feidenheimer, 2023. "Understanding researchers’ Twitter uptake, activity and popularity—an analysis of applied research in Germany," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(1), pages 325-344, January.
    10. Ortega, José Luis, 2018. "The life cycle of altmetric impact: A longitudinal study of six metrics from PlumX," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 579-589.
    11. Mingyang Wang & Zhenyu Wang & Guangsheng Chen, 2019. "Which can better predict the future success of articles? Bibliometric indices or alternative metrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(3), pages 1575-1595, June.
    12. Muñoz, María M. & Rojas-de-Gracia, María-Mercedes & Navas-Sarasola, Carlos, 2022. "Measuring engagement on twitter using a composite index: An application to social media influencers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(4).
    13. Stephan Puehringer & Georg Wolfmayr, 2023. "Organizers and promotors of academic competition? The role of (academic) social networks and platforms in the competitization of science," ICAE Working Papers 152, Johannes Kepler University, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy.
    14. David Howoldt & Henning Kroll & Peter Neuhäusler, 2023. "Relating popularity on Twitter and Linkedin to bibliometric indicators of visibility and interconnectedness: an analysis of 8512 applied researchers in Germany," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(10), pages 5571-5594, October.
    15. Ho Fai Chan & Ali Sina Önder & Sascha Schweitzer & Benno Torgler, 2023. "Twitter and Citations," Working Papers in Economics & Finance 2023-04, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth Business School, Economics and Finance Subject Group.
    16. Cao, Renmeng & Geng, Yu & Xu, Xiaoke & Wang, Xianwen, 2022. "How does duplicate tweeting boost social media exposure to scholarly articles?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(1).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mojisola Erdt & Aarthy Nagarajan & Sei-Ching Joanna Sin & Yin-Leng Theng, 2016. "Altmetrics: an analysis of the state-of-the-art in measuring research impact on social media," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(2), pages 1117-1166, November.
    2. Amalia Mas-Bleda & Mike Thelwall, 2016. "Can alternative indicators overcome language biases in citation counts? A comparison of Spanish and UK research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 2007-2030, December.
    3. Saeed-Ul Hassan & Mubashir Imran & Uzair Gillani & Naif Radi Aljohani & Timothy D. Bowman & Fereshteh Didegah, 2017. "Measuring social media activity of scientific literature: an exhaustive comparison of scopus and novel altmetrics big data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(2), pages 1037-1057, November.
    4. Zhiqi Wang & Wolfgang Glänzel & Yue Chen, 2020. "The impact of preprints in Library and Information Science: an analysis of citations, usage and social attention indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(2), pages 1403-1423, November.
    5. Dorte Drongstrup & Shafaq Malik & Naif Radi Aljohani & Salem Alelyani & Iqra Safder & Saeed-Ul Hassan, 2020. "Can social media usage of scientific literature predict journal indices of AJG, SNIP and JCR? An altmetric study of economics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(2), pages 1541-1558, November.
    6. Hou, Jianhua & Yang, Xiucai, 2020. "Social media-based sleeping beauties: Defining, identifying and features," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(2).
    7. Ortega, José Luis, 2018. "The life cycle of altmetric impact: A longitudinal study of six metrics from PlumX," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 579-589.
    8. Houqiang Yu, 2017. "Context of altmetrics data matters: an investigation of count type and user category," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 111(1), pages 267-283, April.
    9. Saeideh Ebrahimy & Jafar Mehrad & Fatemeh Setareh & Massoud Hosseinchari, 2016. "Path analysis of the relationship between visibility and citation: the mediating roles of save, discussion, and recommendation metrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 1497-1510, December.
    10. Jianhua Hou & Jiantao Ye, 2020. "Are uncited papers necessarily all nonimpact papers? A quantitative analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(2), pages 1631-1662, August.
    11. Joaquin Chapa & Zeeshan Haq & Adam S. Cifu, 2017. "Comparative analysis of the factors associated with citation and media coverage of clinical research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(3), pages 1271-1283, September.
    12. Yu, Houqiang & Xiao, Tingting & Xu, Shenmeng & Wang, Yuefen, 2019. "Who posts scientific tweets? An investigation into the productivity, locations, and identities of scientific tweeters," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 841-855.
    13. Mike Thelwall & Kayvan Kousha & Mahshid Abdoli & Emma Stuart & Meiko Makita & Paul Wilson & Jonathan Levitt, 2023. "Do altmetric scores reflect article quality? Evidence from the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 74(5), pages 582-593, May.
    14. J. C. F. Winter, 2015. "The relationship between tweets, citations, and article views for PLOS ONE articles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(2), pages 1773-1779, February.
    15. Saeed-Ul Hassan & Sehrish Iqbal & Naif R. Aljohani & Salem Alelyani & Alesia Zuccala, 2020. "Introducing the ‘alt-index’ for measuring the social visibility of scientific research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 123(3), pages 1407-1419, June.
    16. Zhichao Fang & Rodrigo Costas & Paul Wouters, 2022. "User engagement with scholarly tweets of scientific papers: a large-scale and cross-disciplinary analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(8), pages 4523-4546, August.
    17. Banshal, Sumit Kumar & Gupta, Solanki & Lathabai, Hiran H & Singh, Vivek Kumar, 2022. "Power Laws in altmetrics: An empirical analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(3).
    18. Xi Zhang & Xianhai Wang & Hongke Zhao & Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos & Yongqiang Sun & Hui Xiong, 2019. "An effectiveness analysis of altmetrics indices for different levels of artificial intelligence publications," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(3), pages 1311-1344, June.
    19. Lutz Bornmann, 2015. "Alternative metrics in scientometrics: a meta-analysis of research into three altmetrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 103(3), pages 1123-1144, June.
    20. Ying Guo & Xiantao Xiao, 2022. "Author-level altmetrics for the evaluation of Chinese scholars," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(2), pages 973-990, February.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:109:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-016-2113-0. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.