Australia; New Zealand; International; WA
A group of scientists with large followings on X (formally Twitter) has conducted a 3-year-long experiment which showed that tweeting about a scientific study does not significantly increase its chances of being referenced by other research, known as its citation rate. The high-profile scientists randomly selected five papers from a journal and tweeted about one, while keeping the other four as controls, then they repeated this 10 times across 11 journals. They found that tweeted articles were downloaded 2.6–3.9 times more often and had higher stats for other measures of attention (Altmetric scores). But when it came to citations, while there was a small increase, it did not reach statistical significance, meaning it could have occurred by chance. The authors say that while discussing science on social media has many benefits (and has been a lot of fun), increasing the citation rate of a scientist’s papers is likely not among them.
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