Controlled experiment finds no detectable citation bump from Twitter promotion.

ABSTRACT: Multiple studies across a variety of scientific disciplines have shown that the number of times that a paper is shared on Twitter (now called X) is correlated with the number of citations that paper receives. However, these studies were not designed to answer whether tweeting about scientific papers causes an increase in citations, or whether they were simply highlighting that some papers have higher relevance, importance or quality and are therefore both tweeted about more and cited more. The authors of this study are leading science communicators on Twitter from several life science disciplines, with substantially higher follower counts than the average scientist, making us uniquely placed to address this question. We conducted a three-year-long controlled experiment, randomly selecting

SUBMITTER: Branch TA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10954115 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature