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.