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Why highly cited articles are not highly tweeted? A biology case

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Abstract

Altmetrics is an emerging topic that has generated much interest. Most of the studies, however, have focused on the comparison of altemetric indicators with traditional citation metrics and few have explored the factors influencing altmetric performance. This study investigates the dissemination pattern of scientific articles on social medial, and is particularly focused on highly tweeted articles and highly cited articles. Based on bibliometric and altmetric data collected for over 40,000 articles in the field of biology, we found that the timing of tweets and the type of Twitter accounts affect the amount of attention that a scientific publication receives on social media. Articles with a large number of tweets tend to be the ones receiving immediate social media exposure and are often tweeted by journal associated organization accounts or other individual accounts with a large number of followers. By contrast, highly cited articles in general are neither tweeted timely nor promoted by their respective journal accounts.

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Notes

    1. (1)

      Member of the public: someone who does not link to scholarly literature and does not fit any of the categories below.

    2. (2)

      Scientist: someone who is familiar with the literature.

    3. (3)

      Practitioner: a clinician or researcher who is working in clinical science.

    4. (4)

      Science communicator: someone who links frequently to scientific articles from a variety of different journals or publishers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. WISE Lab, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116085, China

    Liwei Zhang

  2. School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Jue Wang

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  1. Liwei Zhang
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  2. Jue Wang
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Correspondence to Jue Wang.

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Zhang, L., Wang, J. Why highly cited articles are not highly tweeted? A biology case. Scientometrics 117, 495–509 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2876-6

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