How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted Preprints: Article Downloads, Twitter Mentions, and Citations

By Xin Shuai, Alberto Pepe, Johan Bollen. PLoS ONE, 2012

312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze the online response to the preprint publication of a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and May 2011. We study three forms of responses to these preprints: downloads on the arXiv.org site, mentions on the social media site Twitter, and early citations in the scholarly record. We perform two analyses. First, we analyze the delay and time span of article downloads and Twitter mentions following submission, to understand the temporal configuration of these reactions and whether one precedes or follows the other. Second, we run regression and correlation tests to investigate the relationship between Twitter mentions, arXiv downloads, and article citations. We find that Twitter mentions and arXiv downloads of scholarly articles follow two distinct temporal patterns of activity, with Twitter mentions having shorter delays and narrower time spans than arXiv downloads. We also find that the volume of Twitter mentions is statistically correlated with arXiv downloads and early citations just months after the publication of a preprint, with a possible bias that favors highly mentioned articles.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c3e2b9d1e878569ebbc29a11b917e70a5a26f44e

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Citations in the corpus

Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature (2013, background): “, 2012; Sugimoto, Russell, Meho, & Marchionini, 2008) and are also lower than the demonstrated correlations between tweets and other metrics, such as downloads and Google Scholar citations (Shuai et al., 2012).”
Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data (2012, background): “In a recent work, it is shown that Twitter mentions and arXiv downloads follow two distinct temporal patterns of activity, however, the volume of Twitter mentions is statistically correlated with arXiv downloads and early citations [10].”
Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature (2016, background): “, 2012), whereas discipline or journal samples have shown higher correlations (Eysenbach, 2011; Shuai et al., 2012).”
Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services (2013, background): “Although it seems likely that most altmetric values precede citations - for example, tweets seem to appear shortly after an article has been posted online [25] - this has not been tested here because the data does not include origin dates for the scores.”