Sharing Data Do Not Indicate Twitter Significantly Augments Article-Level Citation Impact of Recent Research Results | Open Science

"In the preprint version of her chapter on the performance of Twitter as a metric of scholarly impact that scientific articles have, which Stefanie Haustein wrote for the Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research, a discussion on the validity of altmetrics is broached.

Guest-authoring a post, published on June 12, 2018, for the Altmetric Blog, Stefanie Haustein, an information science scholar from the University of Ottawa and Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada, has drawn attention to the mixed findings on the connection between Twitter mentions and citation counts of recently published articles. While social media, such as Facebook, can be assumed to contribute to the visibility of scientific research results, the collection of essays on Internet-based indicators for the impact of science edited by Wolfgang Glänzel, Henk Moed, Ulrich Schmoch and Mike Thelwall, to be published later in 2018, incidentally opens the discussion on the degree to which altmetrics can be helpful for the assessment of article-level impact. This can be related to a relatively minor degree, estimated to range from 10% to 15%, to which Twitter is taken up by scholars. Moreover, as is characteristic of other social networks, Twitter use continues to be informal, rather than professional, for the majority of its contributors and audience, which can contribute to the nascence of its utilization for increasing the visibility of scholarly articles. Thus, whereas according to the non-representative, mixed-method study of Jason Priem and Kaithlin Light Costello published in October 2010, in which 28 scholars took part and 46,515 tweets were analyzed, scientists tend to make an indirect use of Twitter for article citation, based on the quantitative empirical findings of Stefanie Haustein, Rodrigo Costas and Vincent Larivière published on March 17, 2015, Twitter is the most important social media platform for spreading the word about academic publications...."