Social Media are important for the impact of Academic Papers

Posted: February 14th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , , , | 3 Comments »

New study finds strong correlation between the relationship between Twitter mentions and both article downloads and article citations

A new study by Xin Shuai, Alberto Pepe and Johan Bollen analyzes the online response of the scientific community to the preprint publication of scholarly articles. Based on a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and April 2011 they study three forms of reactions to these preprints: how they are downloaded on the arXiv.org site, how they are mentioned on the social media site Twitter, and how they are cited in the scholarly record.

They find that Twitter mentions follow rapidly after article submission and that they are correlated with later article downloads and later article citations, indicating that social media may be an important factor in determining the scientific impact of an article.

This fits very well with a study from 2011, where David McKenzie and Berk Özler analyze the Impact of Economics Blogs They found out, that “links from blogs cause a striking increase in the number of abstract views and downloads of economics papers.”


3 Comments on “Social Media are important for the impact of Academic Papers”

  1. 1 Evaluation de la recherche | Pearltrees said at 10:29 on February 15th, 2012:

    […] This fits very well with a study from 2011, where David McKenzie and Berk Özler analyze the Impact of Economics Blogs They found out, that “links from blogs cause a striking increase in the number of abstract views and downloads of economics papers.” Blog » Blog Archive » Social Media are important for the scienti c impact of Academic Papers […]

  2. 2 Linktipps der Woche 7/2012: Theseus abgeschlossen, Impact Faktor messen, neue US-Gesetzesinitiative für Open Access und Qiqqa als neuer Stern am Literaturverwaltungshimmel | Wissenschaft und neue Medien said at 17:05 on February 17th, 2012:

    […] Link zu Social Media are important for the impact of Academic Papers […]

  3. 3 坂東慶太. 文献管理サービスMendeleyの紹介. 医学図書館. 2012;59(3):243-249. « @KeitaBando said at 12:21 on October 12th, 2012:

    […] 14)Olaf Siegert. Social Media are important for the impact of Academic Papers[internet]. http://blog.econstor.eu/2012/02/social-media-are-important-for-the-scientic-impact-of-academic-paper… [accessed 2012-09-10] 15)Abby Tabor. Open Access + Social Media = Competitive […]