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Twitter and citations

Author

Listed:
  • Chan, Ho Fai
  • Önder, Ali Sina
  • Schweitzer, Sascha
  • Torgler, Benno

Abstract

Social media, especially Twitter, plays an increasingly important role among researchers in showcasing and promoting their research. Does Twitter affect academic citations? Making use of Twitter activity about columns published on VoxEU, a renowned online platform for economists, we develop an instrumental variable strategy to show that Twitter activity about a research paper has a causal effect on the number of citations that this paper will receive. We find that the existence of at least one tweet, as opposed to none, increases citations by 16–25%. Doubling overall Twitter engagement boosts citations by up to 16%.

Suggested Citation

  • Chan, Ho Fai & Önder, Ali Sina & Schweitzer, Sascha & Torgler, Benno, 2023. "Twitter and citations," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 231(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:231:y:2023:i:c:s0165176523002951
    DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2023.111270
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Kalaitzidakis, P. & Mamuneas, T.P. & Stengos, T., 2003. "Rankings of Academic Journals and Institutions," Working Papers 2003-8, University of Guelph, Department of Economics and Finance.
    2. 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.
    3. Thomy Tonia & Herman Van Oyen & Anke Berger & Christian Schindler & Nino Künzli, 2016. "If I tweet will you cite? The effect of social media exposure of articles on downloads and citations," International Journal of Public Health, Springer;Swiss School of Public Health (SSPH+), vol. 61(4), pages 513-520, May.
    4. Pantelis Kalaitzidakis & Theofanis P. Mamuneas & Thanasis Stengos, 2003. "Rankings of Academic Journals and Institutions in Economics," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 1(6), pages 1346-1366, December.
    5. Chan, Ho Fai & Bodiuzzman, Sohel Md & Torgler, Benno, 2020. "The power of social cues in the battle for attention: Evidence from an online platform for scholarly commentary," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    6. Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Sam Work & Vincent Larivière & Stefanie Haustein, 2017. "Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 68(9), pages 2037-2062, September.
    7. 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.
    8. Samara Klar & Yanna Krupnikov & John Barry Ryan & Kathleen Searles & Yotam Shmargad, 2020. "Using social media to promote academic research: Identifying the benefits of twitter for sharing academic work," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(4), pages 1-15, April.
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Productivity; Social media; Twitter; Citations; Economists;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A14 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Sociology of Economics
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

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