ArticlePloS one2013
Do altmetrics work? Twitter and ten other social web services.
Article in PloS one, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 135 papers, 6 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
135 citing papers in PubMed, 6 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Vaccination for Human Papillomavirus: an historic and bibliometric study.Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2021Pooled it
- The Use of Social Media to Increase the Impact of Health Research: Systematic Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Pooled it
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- The impact of low back pain systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines measured by the Altmetric score: Cross-Sectional study.Brazilian journal of physical therapyPooled it
- Randomized Controlled Trial of Social Media: Effect of Increased Intensity of the Intervention.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2016Trial
- On the makeup of high-impact reviews in ecology.Eco-Environment & Health · 2026Article
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- Association of Twitter author Altmetric patterns with research impact in ophthalmology.International ophthalmology · 2025Article
- Analysis of the Highest Altmetrics-scored Articles in Emergency Medicine Journals.The western journal of emergency medicine · 2025Article
- Assessing the visibility and public engagement of bone marrow and stem cell transplantation research: An altmetric analysis.Heliyon · 2025Article
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- Sentiment analysis of research attention: the Altmetric proof of concept.Frontiers in research metrics and analytics · 2025Article
- #SharingHEOR: Developing Modern Media for Communication and Dissemination of Health Economics and Outcomes Research.Applied health economics and health policy · 2024Article
- Connecting through ISEV's developing social media landscape.Journal of extracellular vesicles · 2024Article
- The bibliometric and altmetric analysis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy research: how great is the impact?Frontiers in neurology · 2024Article
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75 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have reported medium correlations between specific altmetrics and citation rates for individual journals or fields. To fill this gap, this study compares 11 altmetrics with Web of Science citations for 76 to 208,739 PubMed articles with at least one altmetric mention in each case and up to 1,891 journals per metric. It also introduces a simple sign test to overcome biases caused by different citation and usage windows. Statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and higher citations for articles with positive altmetric scores in all cases with sufficient evidence (Twitter, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blogs, mainstream media and forums) except perhaps for Google+ posts. Evidence was insufficient for LinkedIn, Pinterest, question and answer sites, and Reddit, and no conclusions should be drawn about articles with zero altmetric scores or the strength of any correlation between altmetrics and citations. Nevertheless, comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles. Finally, the coverage of all the altmetrics except for Twitter seems to be low and so it is not clear if they are prevalent enough to be useful in practice.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.