Social Media and Academic Impact: Do Early Tweets Correlate with Future Citations?

Objective: This study aims to determine whether social media platforms (SMPs) can influence article impact as measured by citations.

Methods: This is a cross-sectional study that analyzed articles published in the top ten otolaryngology journals by the Eigenfactor score in January 2015. Total accumulated twitter mentions and citations were recorded in 2021. The main outcomes examined the difference in citations, tweets, article types, and author counts accumulated over a 5-year period for all articles that were either tweeted or non-tweeted.

Results: 3094 articles were included for analysis. The average article was cited 11.2 ± 13.2 times and tweeted 2.10 ± 4.0 times. Sixty-four percent of the articles had at least one tweet. Over the study period, there was a statistically significant difference in mean number of citations between tweeted articles (12.1 ± 15.0) vs non-tweeted articles (9.6 ± 10.5) citations, representing a 26% difference ( < .001). Review articles had the highest mean citations (19.4 ± 23.4), while editorials had the lowest mean citations (2.8 ± 6.9). Tweets peaked in the year of publication, but citations continued to rise in the subsequent years. Tweeted articles' peak citation rate change was +1.27 mean citations per year, compared to +.99 mean citations per year in non-tweeted articles. The mean author count in tweeted articles (5.40 ± 3.1) was not significantly different than mean author count in non-tweeted articles (5.19 ± 2.65, = .0794).

Conclusion: These data suggest a moderate correlation between tweets and article citations, but a clear difference in the number of citations in articles tweeted vs those with no tweets. Thus, dissemination of knowledge may be impacted by social media platforms such as Twitter.