Do you cite what you tweet? Investigating the relationship between tweeting and citing research articles

TL;DR

This study investigates whether individual tweets about research articles are associated with the likelihood of citing those same articles, revealing patterns related to institutional affiliation, publication history, and academic age.

Contribution

It uniquely analyzes the relationship between tweeting and citing at the individual tweet level, considering the research activity of the tweeter.

Findings

Tweeters are more likely to cite works from their institution.

Citing likelihood increases with the number of publications and references.

Older tweeters are less likely to cite what they tweet.

Abstract

The last decade of altmetrics research has demonstrated that altmetrics have a low to moderate correlation with citations, depending on the platform and the discipline, among other factors. Most past studies used academic works as their unit of analysis to determine whether the attention they received on Twitter was a good predictor of academic engagement. Our work revisits the relationship between tweets and citations where the tweet itself is the unit of analysis, and the question is to determine if, at the individual level, the act of tweeting an academic work can shed light on the likelihood of the act of citing that same work. We model this relationship by considering the research activity of the tweeter and its relationship to the tweeted work. Results show that tweeters are more likely to cite works affiliated with their same institution, works published in journals in which they also have published, and works in which they hold authorship. It finds that the older the academic age of a tweeter the less likely they are to cite what they tweet, though there is a positive relationship between citations and the number of works they have published and references they have accumulated over time.