The benefit of Twitter (now ‘X’) to scientists wanting to expand the reach of their work has been disputed after an experiment from US, Australia, New Zealand, and UK-based researchers.
These scientists, who average 20,000 followers on the social media platform, spent 3 years tracking whether research papers they shared on the microblogging platform had received more citations from other academics than a group of control papers.
Citations are used throughout academia as a means for referencing reputable, valuable source material, but for research authors, being cited is just as desirable as a way to build reputation and credibility.
Although tweets promoting research papers were found to have more downloads than papers that weren’t shared, this didn’t translate to citations in future work. There was no statistically significant difference between papers that were tweeted and those that weren’t.
But there was a significant improvement in Altmetrics scores, which broadly indicate other distribution data like article downloads, views, and links across social media and the web, as opposed to traditional citation counts.
“I personally was surprised that while there was a significant increase in attention metrics such as Altmetric scores and number of tweets [for papers], there wasn’t a corresponding increase in citations,” says Melissa Marquez, a marine biologist and Cosmos correspondent who was one of the paper’s co-authors.
“The results suggest that while tweeting may broaden the audience and increase awareness of scientific research among the general public, it may not directly impact the scholarly recognition of a paper within the academic community.”
“A lot of fun” but not much impact
Another contributor was New Zealand based ecologist Michelle La Rue. While her co-authors agreed that the science communication aspect of Twitter use was “a lot of fun” it may mean the social media platform is less useful if a researcher’s primary goal is to grow citations.
“Anytime I would talk about penguins, as an example, I would gain tons and tons of followers and a lot of interaction,” La Rue says.
“I also had a lot of speaking engagements and invitations from being on Twitter, so from my personal experience, Twitter is a good thing.”
The research only used Twitter/X for sharing papers, which may not give an accurate reflection of social media’s impact for researchers (Twitter is the 12th most-used social media platform globally).
Last year 80% of researchers who use social media to promote their work indicated to Cosmos their usage of Twitter had dropped off or ceased altogether.
