Tweets don’t bring citations, randomised controlled study finds
Social media’s benefits rest more on building scientific networks than promotion
It’s generally thought that tweeting about a research paper will get it more citations — one traditional indicator of the scholarly impact of a scientific paper. Now a group of scientists with large followings on X, formerly Twitter, has conducted a three-year study which concludes that, while discussing science on social media has many benefits – and can be ‘a lot of fun’ – increasing a paper’s citations is probably not one of them.
The group of biological and environmental scientists – with followers ranging from 4000 to 48,000 on X – randomly selected five papers from a journal and tweeted about one, while keeping the other four as controls. They repeated this 10 times across 11 journals, recording Altmetric scores, a measure of how much attention a research article receives, the number of tweets, and citation counts before and after tweeting.