Abstract
Purpose :
Social media platforms, such as Twitter, have become increasingly popular within academia. Given the growing presence of eye researchers on these platforms, it’s imperative that Twitter behaviors be correlated with academic impact in ophthalmology. In this study, we determined how Twitter patterns amongst authors, institutions, and journals affect the number of citations and views an original research article receives.
Methods :
Data from original research articles in the top 10 ophthalmology journals as determined by SCimago Journal Rank (SJR) was recorded. Of the 10 ophthalmology journals identified, 3 were excluded due to publication of review articles only for the 2021 year, yielding 7 total journals containing 1,098 original research articles. Article impact and Twitter data were retrospectively recorded using Scopus, Google Scholar, and PlumX Metrics. Pearson correlation, ANOVA, and unpaired t tests were performed using GraphPad Prism, with a p value of less than 0.05 considered statistically significantly.
Results :
The number of Scopus citations and views original research articles received had a significant positive correlation with the total number of tweets by authors of said article, the total number of tweets, and the total number of retweets (p<0.0001). While there was no significant effect on citations or views when only the first or senior (corresponding) author individually tweeted about the publication, we observed a significantly greater number of citations and views when at least one author regardless of authorship position tweeted about the publication (p<0.0001 and p<0.0001, respectively). Both the author’s affiliated institution and the journal tweeting about a publication was associated with a greater number of citations (p<0.0001 and p=0.0025, respectively) and views for that article (p<0.0001 and p=.0.0025, respectively).
Conclusions :
Twitter tweets and retweets about a publication reflect the current impact of social media on ophthalmology research and could be used as a future gauge of academic productivity. Furthermore, ophthalmology journals, authors of ophthalmology publications, and affiliated institutions may benefit from promoting their associated article on Twitter in an effort to increase the number of citations and views their article receives.
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.