Ortega, J. L. (2016). To be or not to be on Twitter, and its relationship with the tweeting and citation of research papers. Scientometrics, 109(2), 1353-1364. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-016-2113-0

University of California, Berkeley

This paper looks at the relation between Twitter and citations of papers, specifically comparing authors of articles with Twitters and authors without. While the difference between these groups was not found to have an impact on citation numbers, the number of followers of those that did have Twitter accounts did. 

To be or not to be on Twitter, and its relationship
with the tweeting and citation of research papers

PlumX Analytics was used to extract author profiles of those with and without Twitter accounts. From these profiles, Scopus API was used to extract citation numbers. All of this data was taken from April of 2016.

From PlumX Analytics they were able to extraxt 1097 authors' profiles with papers published between 2013 and 2016. This resulted in 62874 publications. From these 1097 profiles, PlumX Analytics showed that 36 of them had Twitter accounts. Researhers then manually also looked through the list of authors to see if they had Twitter accounts not displayed on PlumX Analytics. They resulted in a group of 76 profiles with Twitter accounts and a control group of 124 profiles without Twitter accounts. These 200 profiles consisted of 4166 papers. Data for these papers were then collected using Scopus. 

To be or not to be on Twitter, and its relationship
with the tweeting and citation of research papers data collection

To be or not to be on Twitter, and its relationship with the tweeting and citation of research papers

Two methods were used to analyze the data: Student's t test and regression analysis. Variables were also transformed to logarithmic scale (ln + 1). 

Student's t test: This compared the means of the two groups and established confidence intervals for both. 

Regression analysis:  This was used to estimate how Twitter activity (tweets, followers, followings) influence the distribution of tweets and citations for each researcher. 

To be or not to be on Twitter, and its relationship with the tweeting and citation of research papers data analysis

- papers from authors that use Twitter are more tweeted than those that do not 
- the number of followers an author is has is what most significantly influences number of tweets as well as number of citations
- Being a twitter-user or not did not influence citation numbers

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