- Used Web of Science to extract publication and citation data for papers published in 2012; citations were collected based on a 3-year window until 2015
- Used Altmetric.com to obtain Twitter data, including tweets published by June 2015
- Used DOI identify the connection between WoS and Altmetric data 
- 1,131,358 papers published in 2012 that had a DOI were included in the study
- Papers were divided into 3 groups – Group 1 (160,233) at least one Chinese author; Group 2 (145,325) first author is from China; Group 3 (119,268) only Chinese authors 
- Chinese authors defined by affiliation to Chinese institution rather than citizenship

Can Twitter increase the visibility of Chinese publications? data collection

- Pairwise comparison of relative citation rate between publications that were tweeted vs. not tweeted based on the journal and publication year 
- Initial distribution was right-skewed, so 4 thresholds were applied – T0 at least 1; T1 at least 5; T2 at least 10; T3 at least 20 tweeted and 20 non-tweeted publications

Can Twitter increase the visibility of Chinese publications? within-journal comparison

- Papers categorized into one of 12 disciplines using the National Science Foundation (NSF) classification system 
- Within each discipline, compared the rate of citations for tweeted and non-tweeted publications

Can Twitter increase the visibility of Chinese publications? discipline comparison

- Compare geometric means of citations rates for countries that most frequently tweeted and cited the Chinse publications in Group 3 (only Chinese authors) to avoid including people who tweet about their own work 

Can Twitter increase the visibility of Chinese publications? source country comparison

- Data collection
- Within-journal comparison
- Discipline comparison
- Source country comparison

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

- Chinese publications that were tweeted gained 15% more citations
- Citation advantage due to Twitter mentions varied by discipline
- Results imply a correlation between Twitter mentions and citations of Chinese publications
- Cannot infer causation due to the same collection period used for both tweets and citations

Can Twitter increase the visibility of Chinese publications?

Shu, F., Lou, W., & Haustein, S. (2018). Can Twitter increase the visibility of Chinese publications?. Scientometrics, 116(1), 505-519. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-018-2732-8 

Can Twitter increase the visibility of Chinese publications? methodology

- Source countries were not located for 1/3 of the tweets
- Impact of the order at which authors are listed on visibility was not examined
- Do more research on the content of Chinese publications and their citation count

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