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Branch TA, Cȏté IM, David SR, Drew JA, LaRue M, Márquez MC, Parsons ECM, Rabaiotti D, Shiffman D, Steen DA, Wild AL. Controlled experiment finds no detectable citation bump from Twitter promotion. PLoS One 2024; 19:e0292201. [PMID: 38507397 PMCID: PMC10954115 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0292201] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/25/2023] [Accepted: 12/13/2023] [Indexed: 03/22/2024] Open
Abstract
Multiple studies across a variety of scientific disciplines have shown that the number of times that a paper is shared on Twitter (now called X) is correlated with the number of citations that paper receives. However, these studies were not designed to answer whether tweeting about scientific papers causes an increase in citations, or whether they were simply highlighting that some papers have higher relevance, importance or quality and are therefore both tweeted about more and cited more. The authors of this study are leading science communicators on Twitter from several life science disciplines, with substantially higher follower counts than the average scientist, making us uniquely placed to address this question. We conducted a three-year-long controlled experiment, randomly selecting five articles published in the same month and journal, and randomly tweeting one while retaining the others as controls. This process was repeated for 10 articles from each of 11 journals, recording Altmetric scores, number of tweets, and citation counts before and after tweeting. Randomization tests revealed that tweeted articles were downloaded 2.6-3.9 times more often than controls immediately after tweeting, and retained significantly higher Altmetric scores (+81%) and number of tweets (+105%) three years after tweeting. However, while some tweeted papers were cited more than their respective control papers published in the same journal and month, the overall increase in citation counts after three years (+7% for Web of Science and +12% for Google Scholar) was not statistically significant (p > 0.15). Therefore while discussing science on social media has many professional and societal benefits (and has been a lot of fun), increasing the citation rate of a scientist's papers is likely not among them.
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Affiliation(s)
- Trevor A. Branch
- School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America
| | - Isabelle M. Cȏté
- Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
| | - Solomon R. David
- Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America
| | - Joshua A. Drew
- Department of Environmental Biology, State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, NY, United States of America
| | - Michelle LaRue
- School of Earth and Environment, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
- Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America
| | - Melissa C. Márquez
- School of Molecular and Life Sciences, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
| | - E. C. M. Parsons
- Centre for Ecology & Conservation, University of Exeter—Penryn Campus, Cornwall, United Kingdom
| | - D. Rabaiotti
- Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London, United Kingdom
| | - David Shiffman
- Arizona State University, New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Phoenix, Arizona, United States of America
| | - David A. Steen
- Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America
| | - Alexander L. Wild
- Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, United States of America
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