Social Media and Academic Impact: Do Early Tweets Correlate With Future Citations?

Abstract

Objective: Determine whether social media platforms can influence article impact as measured by citations. Methods: Cross-sectional study that analyzed articles published in the top 10 otolaryngology journals by Eigenfactor score in January 2015. Total accumulated Twitter mentions and citations were recorded in 2021. The main outcomes examined the difference in citations, tweets, article types, and author counts accumulated over a 5-year period for all articles that were either tweeted or nontweeted. Results: A total of 3094 articles were included for analysis. The average article was cited 11.2 ± 13.2 times and tweeted 2.10 ± 4.0 times. Sixty-four percent of the articles had at least one tweet. Over the study period, there was a statistically significant difference in mean number of citations between tweeted articles (12.1 ± 15.0) versus nontweeted articles (9.6 ± 10.5) citations, representing a 26% difference ( P < .001). Review articles had the highest mean citations (19.4 ± 23.4) while editorials had the lowest mean citations (2.8 ± 6.9). Tweets peaked in the year of publication, but citations continued to rise in the subsequent years. Tweeted articles’ peak citation rate change was +1.27 mean citations per year, compared to +0.99 mean citations per year in nontweeted articles. The mean author count in tweeted articles (5.40 ± 3.1) was not significantly different than the mean author count in nontweeted articles (5.19 ± 2.65, P = .0794). Conclusion: These data suggest a moderate correlation between tweets and article citations, but a clear difference in the number of citations in articles tweeted versus those with no tweets. Thus, dissemination of knowledge may be impacted by social medial platforms such as Twitter.