ArticlePloS one2016
Twitter Predicts Citation Rates of Ecological Research.
Article in PloS one, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers, 1 of them a synthesis 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
40 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Evaluating Large Language Models for Post-Publication Promotion: A Blinded Comparative Study of Social Media Posts in Public Health.Journal of Korean medical science · 2026Article
- Title, abstract and keywords: a practical guide to maximize the visibility and impact of academic papers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- A memory-theoretic account of citation propagation.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Article
- The Effect of Open Access on Scholarly and Societal Metrics of Impact in the ASHA Journals.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2023Article
- Citation counts and journal impact factors do not capture some indicators of research quality in the behavioural and brain sciences.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Article
- Social media usage to share information in communication journals: An analysis of social media activity and article citations.PloS one · 2022Article
- The pandemic semesters: Examining public opinion regarding online learning amidst COVID-19.Journal of computer assisted learning · 2021Article
- Twitter integration of chemistry software tools.Journal of cheminformatics · 2021Article
- Reach and Power of Physician-Initiated Tweets in a Twitter Inflammatory Bowel Disease Community.Crohn's & colitis 360 · 2021Article
- The Patterns and Impact of Social Media Exposure of Journal Publications in Gastroenterology: Retrospective Cohort Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Article
- Expert communication on Twitter: Comparing economists' and scientists' social networks, topics and communicative styles.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2021Article
- Measuring epistemic success of a biodiversity citizen science program: A citation study.PloS one · 2021Article
- Going rogue: what scientists can learn about Twitter communication from "alt" government accounts.PeerJ · 2021Article
- Microbiome Research: Open Communication Today, Microbiome Applications in the Future.Microorganisms · 2020Article
- Where are all the anthelmintics? Challenges and opportunities on the path to new anthelmintics.International journal for parasitology. Drugs and drug resistance · 2020Article
- If I tweet will you cite later? Follow-up on the effect of social media exposure on article downloads and citations.International journal of public health · 2020Observational
- Social Media Influence Does Not Reflect Scholarly or Clinical Activity in Real Life.Circulation. Arrhythmia and electrophysiology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The relationship between traditional metrics of research impact (e.g., number of citations) and alternative metrics (altmetrics) such as Twitter activity are of great interest, but remain imprecisely quantified. We used generalized linear mixed modeling to estimate the relative effects of Twitter activity, journal impact factor, and time since publication on Web of Science citation rates of 1,599 primary research articles from 20 ecology journals published from 2012-2014. We found a strong positive relationship between Twitter activity (i.e., the number of unique tweets about an article) and number of citations. Twitter activity was a more important predictor of citation rates than 5-year journal impact factor. Moreover, Twitter activity was not driven by journal impact factor; the 'highest-impact' journals were not necessarily the most discussed online. The effect of Twitter activity was only about a fifth as strong as time since publication; accounting for this confounding factor was critical for estimating the true effects of Twitter use. Articles in impactful journals can become heavily cited, but articles in journals with lower impact factors can generate considerable Twitter activity and also become heavily cited. Authors may benefit from establishing a strong social media presence, but should not expect research to become highly cited solely through social media promotion. Our research demonstrates that altmetrics and traditional metrics can be closely related, but not identical. We suggest that both altmetrics and traditional citation rates can be useful metrics of research impact.
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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.