Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature

By S. Haustein, Isabella Peters, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Mike Thelwall, Vincent Larivière. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2013

456 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Data collected by social media platforms have been introduced as new sources for indicators to help measure the impact of scholarly research in ways that are complementary to traditional citation analysis. Data generated from social media activities can be used to reflect broad types of impact. This article aims to provide systematic evidence about how often Twitter is used to disseminate information about journal articles in the biomedical sciences. The analysis is based on 1.4 million documents covered by both PubMed and Web of Science and published between 2010 and 2012. The number of tweets containing links to these documents was analyzed and compared to citations to evaluate the degree to which certain journals, disciplines, and specialties were represented on Twitter and how far tweets correlate with citation impact. With less than 10% of PubMed articles mentioned on Twitter, its uptake is low in general but differs between journals and specialties. Correlations between tweets and citations are low, implying that impact metrics based on tweets are different from those based on citations. A framework using the coverage of articles and the correlation between Twitter mentions and citations is proposed to facilitate the evaluation of novel social‐media‐based metrics.

Subfields: Health, Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ceafcb16898eab265024b840c5d997ecce3e769b

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Citations in the corpus

Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective (2014, result): “As has been previously discussed (Haustein et al., 2014; Wouters & Costas, 2012), data quality problems are an important issue in this field, and for this reason caution and modesty are needed when discussing the results.”
Do altmetrics point to the broader impact of research? An overview of benefits and disadvantages of altmetrics (2014, background): “This covers forms of impact, such as policy change, and effects on clinical practice, technical applications, education, and health policies (Haustein, 2014; Haustein et al., 2014; Neylon, et al., 2014).”
Characterizing Social Media Metrics of Scholarly Papers: The Effect of Document Properties and Collaboration Patterns (2015, background): “Despite this correlation, it has become clear that social medial metrics and citations indicate different aspects of the diffusion and use of scientific documents, and that the former cannot be considered a replacement of the latter [28,30,34].”