New findings from a study published in International Ophthalmology evaluated how Twitter (now known as X) posting patterns amongst authors, institutions, and journals affect the academic impact of ophthalmology research articles.
Give me some background.
Over the last near decade, social media use has proliferated in ophthalmology as it allows for:
- Rapid dissemination of accurate medical information
- Networking with colleagues internationally
- Sharing of awards and accolades
- Promotion of one’s research
Moreover: Previous studies have demonstrated a significant correlation between social media usage and article downloads and citation counts across various other medical specialties.
So how do researchers measure the impact of social media on research?
Altmetrics (alternative metrics) have emerged in recent years as a complementary way to evaluate the impact of research articles outside traditional metrics such as citation counts, journal impact factor, and author H-index.
- How this is done: By quantifying public engagement through readership count, sharing on various social media platforms, viewer comments, and measurements of article downloads.
And how does Twitter rank among these platforms?
Twitter is the most widely used social media platform amongst ophthalmology journals, with more than 30% of those journals having an active presence on it and well-known professional organizations within ophthalmology have follower bases of thousands of people.
A few prime examples:
- American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO)
- American Journal of Ophthalmology (AJO)
- Ophthalmology (AAOjournal)
- Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO)
- American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery (ASCRS)
Now to this study.
In this cross-sectional study, the research team recorded data from 1,086 research articles in the top seven ophthalmology journals as determined by SCimago Journal Rank (SJR) for 2021 issues, including:
- Ophthalmology
- JAMA Ophthalmology
- American Journal of Ophthalmology
- Ophthalmology Retina
- British Journal of Ophthalmology
- Ocular Surface
- Progress in Retinal and Eye Research
And what was collected?
Investigators utilized the Scopus database and PlumX Metrics to retrospectively record:
- Article citations
- Article captures (i.e., bookmarking or favoriting a publication, adding to a virtual library, exporting/saving it, etc.)
- Twitter metrics
Secondary analyses explored the relationship between Twitter engagement and academic impact via:
- Authorship position (e.g., first, middle, senior)
- Author institution
- Publishing journal with the academic impact of each original article
Findings?
Across the seven journals, JAMA Ophthalmology had the highest number of mean tweets, retweets, citations, and captures.
The number of citations and captures that original research articles received had a significant positive correlation with the total tweets and retweets in general as well as self-tweets by authors of the article (p<0.0001).
- Further: Articles tweeted by at least one author had a 1.7-fold increase in citations (p = 0.0012).
Tell me more.
While there was no significant effect on citations when a senior author or middle author tweeted about the publication, investigators noted a significantly greater number of citations when a first author tweeted about the publication (p = 0.0329).
Both the author’s affiliated institution and the journal tweeting about a publication were associated with more citations for that article (p<0.001) and p=0.0025, respectively) and captures for that article (p < 0.0001 and p = 0.0025, respectively).
Expert opinion?
On using Twitter in ophthalmology: “We found that only 16.48% of ophthalmology articles were tweeted by at least one author and only 6.9% of ophthalmology articles were tweeted by the first author,” the study authors shared.
- This was compared to 24.7% of academic publications pertaining to shoulder and elbow surgery being tweeted by their own authors.
“It’s worth noting that self-tweeting one’s article is especially beneficial for first authors who are early in their career and would significantly benefit from an increase in their academic impact,” they added.
Limitations?
These included:
- Only evaluating the quantity of author self-tweets and not the content of the tweets
- Not controlling for the quality of work or the quantity of tweets from each individual author
- Only looking at the top seven ophthalmology journals
- Authors who had multiple affiliations could have skewed the data, as manuscripts with multiple affiliations would be more likely to have positive affiliation engagement
- Articles that were published earlier in the year likely had more time to accrue both Twitter engagement and citations
Take home.
These findings suggest that Twitter altmetric data may be a helpful gauge of future academic impact of ophthalmology research articles.
Additionally: Authors of recent ophthalmology publications, ophthalmology journals, and academic institutions may benefit from promoting research articles on Twitter to increase visibility and citations.