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Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial
- choward 6y agoI find it ironic that this is about citations and it costs $36 just to read. So if you wanted to cite this and somebody wanted to verify they would have to spend another $36.
- joelthelion 6y agoOr they could use sci-hub
- awtawtwat3aw 6y agoas an outsider, it's always fun to read the research paper drama.
- azhenley 6y agoMost authors put the preprint on their website for free. Almost every paper I try to read can be found on Google Scholar.
- adwww 6y agoExcept this one.
- 6510 6y agoTweeting improves citations
- ykevinator 6y agoYour tax dollars at work.
- captn3m0 6y agohttps://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.athoracsur.2020.04.065 https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.athoracsur.2020.04.065
- mhandley 6y agoThe research community really should do a better job of engaging with the wider world, irrespective of whether it increases citations. For example, I had this paper in Hotnets 2019, and about 80 people saw my presentation. But I also spent some time, turned it into a little video and put it on YouTube. 360,000 people have seen it there. Now the subtleties were probably lost on many of those people, but if only a few of those people got something out of it, then it will likely have had more impact than the original paper. https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY
- Swizec 6y agoThis reminds me of a story from Steven Levitt. He published Freakonomics together with Stephen Dubner then went back into academia while Dubner went down the podcaster route. 15 years later, Dubner has reached millions of people with his work and Levitt recently started a podcast and soft quit academia after realizing that one of his best papers after years of research and hard work got 3 citations. He assumes fewer than 20 people will ever read that work.
- sidr 6y agoI'm not sure why number of views/reads is the metric to optimize for, though. I'm sure more people listen to the Joe Rogan Experience than have read a Mathematical Theory of Communication. Does that intrinsically make it worth more?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoThis is actually very scary to me. This means that many papers citation list is not a result of a thorough literature search but rather the authors recalling papers they might have read or seen on social media. This is dangerous in that if there were papers from before The Tweet era that actually found that part of your research protocol was bad, they would not be found. An example of this is the rat maze study that Feynman cites. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm That last thing we need is clickbait science.
- Iv 6y agoKill Elsevier and paywall then. They are the alternative but no one is going to pay 30$ per paper they need to read. If references were hyper links to the full pdf, they would get more views
- haihaibye 6y agoI'm all for open access, but this experiment didn't change the accessibility of the papers.
- viraptor 6y agoSome alternative explanations (likely a mix of them): papers that you see / think about influence the direction of your research; lit review is done early, but relevant papers you see in the process will be added; lit review is never going to be perfect, so more advertising = more chances of spotting something relevant.
- LetThereBeNick 6y agoUnlike in the past, it’s impossible to read every paper in one’s field. Since tools like PubMed, ISI, and Scopus all use a proprietary algorithm to rank search results, I appreciate any alternative channels for bringing relevant papers to my attention. It’s also perfectly justified to search for papers solely based on how influential they’ve been in your field. Papers which trend on Twitter (perhaps long-awaited results) are already having an impact on labs, probably being discussed in journal club and shaping the trajectory of the field.
- Iv 6y agoTl;Dr : yes. Immensely. Almost 9 times.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoThis is really frightening for anyone who works in these fields but isn't on any of the main social networks. I left facebook and co years ago and feel much better for it. I get that marketing matters, but marketing on a shitshow like twitter seems sanity challenging.
- eXpl0it3r 6y agoTwitter is what you make it to be. If you follow people that post a lot of (angry) political stuff and you get yourself involved and also tweet about it, then yes, things become quickly a shitshow. If you however look for people that talk about stuff you're interested in or of your own field, then you can get a lot of interesting conversations with people all over the world. Use the unfollow button and/or mute option for people that bring too much negativity to your feed and don't engage in negativity yourself.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoThe problem is that (last time I looked) you can't only look at people's tweets. You have to see people's retweets too. So most attempts to only see certain aspects of twitter are too hard or incredibly limiting.
- eXpl0it3r 6y agoWith TweetDeck [1] you can select whether you want to include retweets or not [2], plus a lot of other useful options. However, I think RTs enhance the experience a lot, as you get to discover other people with similar interest kind of organically. But the same rule applies to people who RT a lot of negativity heavy tweets, just unfollow of mute them. If you're interested, I recently wrote a bit about how I've been using Twitter quite happily in the past few years [3]. [1] https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ [2] https://i.imgur.com/0GOMZvg.png https://i.imgur.com/0GOMZvg.png [3] https://dev.my-gate.net/2020/05/30/eight-years-on-twitter/ https://dev.my-gate.net/2020/05/30/eight-years-on-twitter/
- 6y ago
- jigar24 6y agoGreat case study!!
- founderling 6y agoWell, tweeting where? If it is tweeted on an account with 0 followers, then certainly not, right? And when tweeted to one millioin scientists in the same field, then certainly yes, right?
- reportgunner 6y agoTweeting is science now.
- barbegal 6y ago> 4 articles were prospectively tweeted per day by a designated TSSMN (Thoracic Surgery Social Media Network) delegate and retweeted by all other TSSMN delegates (n=11) with a combined followership of 52,893 individuals and @TSSMN for 14 days
- Traster 6y agoI find this incredibly unsurprising, if you follow journalists on twitter you'll hear the same thing over and over again. They say twitter is a disaster, every time you say anything slightly controversial you'll get dozens of random strangers attack you, and some will even permanently follow you insulting you until you block them. They also say they can't leave because it's one of the primary drivers of traffic to their articles and it would be impossible to achieve the metrics their employer requires without it. It seems a strange property that twitter has developed of being both a terrible experience but also incredibly effective at organic advertising.
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y agoUgh, this is so right. A lot of the trolls are also just new accounts the IRL troll makes to keep harassing. And don't forget the bots and the hordes of paid trolls employed by either companies or foreign governments to foment decisiveness. It reminds me of the Simpson's episode when the teachers go on strike and Bart runs through the angry mob yelling inflammatory and accusatory tripe.
- barbegal 6y agoThe statistical analysis in this paper is really poor. Without the raw data I would say it is impossible to tell anything from this study. > change in citations at 1 year (Tweeted +3.1±2.4 vs. Non-Tweeted +0.7±1.3, p<0.001) I don't know what that p<0.001 means in this context but there is certainly more than a 0.1% chance that the null hypothesis (the two distributions are the same) given those 95% confidence intervals. The graphs that are used to illustrate the paper have completely different confidence intervals than the numbers in the paper and look too good to be true. Given the average tweet was engaged with less than 16 times I really doubt that the effect size would be this big. This looks to me to be the case that a couple of good papers happened to be tweeted and that nothing statistically significant can be gleaned from this paper. Having said that I am not a professional statistician so I would appreciate the input of someone more knowledgeable than myself.
- BorisTheBrave 6y agoPerhaps ±2.4 is the estimated population standard deviation of the tweeted group, rather than a confidence interval. The confidence interval could be the smaller value you seein the charts. Two distributions can overlap a lot and still have a low p-value for anova etc if there are enough data points.
- Will_Do 6y agoYeah I agree this looks like one of those times where the researches aren't interested in doing the stats at all so just mail it in. Just ignoring the stats though the results seem pretty solid. 3x the number of citations with ~100 observations. If the tweets were truly randomly assigned and there aren't big outliers driving results (big ifs, not gonna go deep enough to find out), their conclusion should be fine.
- shahinrostami 6y agoPerhaps a "relevant" paper "The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists" (https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-014-0424-0 https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...)
- barbegal 6y agoThis is just a joke paper, there is no statistical analysis in it and the key findings are: some scientists the author knows have more followers than others.
- yassine_taw 6y agoI'm currently building an alternative to twitter to publish summaries of papers. It's called Abstra. We're hoping to give researcher a better format to share their stuff, and a quick option for that to avoid wasting time. Would love to have your feedback! Abstra.co.uk
- sidravi1 6y agoI'd love to see the paper (but don't want to pay $36 for it). Citations are often power-law distributed - I'd suspect one outliers is driving this effect.