Tweeting Authors: Impact on Research Publicity and Downstream Citations

Abstract

The increasing ubiquity of social media has revolutionized medical and scientific communication, with considerable emerging interest in the use of Twitter for research dissemination (1, 2). Over the past decade, the field of Pulmonary and Critical CareMedicine has innovatively applied this technology to build international research communities and promote knowledge translation (3). Previous studies have determined that highly tweeted articles are well-cited (4), and consequently some journals have begun requiring peer-reviewed journalissued tweets to accompany publications (5). While researchers have a clear incentive to promote their work, their individual potential to impact its dissemination via Twitter is unclear and the impact of direct author tweeting on citations has not been previously studied. We therefore sought to determine if articles published in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine journals tweeted by their authors received greater downstream tweets and citations compared with non-author-tweeted articles.