
Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial - XzetaU8
https://www.annalsthoracicsurgery.org/article/S0003-4975(20)30860-2/pdf
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mhandley
The research community really should do a better job of engaging with the
wider world, irrespective of whether it increases citations. For example, I
had this paper in Hotnets 2019, and about 80 people saw my presentation. But I
also spent some time, turned it into a little video and put it on YouTube.
360,000 people have seen it there. Now the subtleties were probably lost on
many of those people, but if only a few of those people got something out of
it, then it will likely have had more impact than the original paper.

[https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY](https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY)

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jessriedel
Most research is not useful or suitable to the wider world.

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mhandley
Well, there are gradations to "the wider world". I don't know about you, but I
read a lot of stuff that's way outside my area. That's why I hang out here.
There's a huge gulf between "suitable for mainstream TV" and the opaque and
overly compacted research paper. Places like New Scientist and Ars Technica
fill this gap to some extent, but they tend to oversimplify to appeal to a
wider audience. I'd rather hear it from the authors in an only slightly dumbed
down form.

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yassine_taw
Same feeling here. That's why a friend of mine and I created Abstra. We ask
authors to come and do some vulgarization themselves. The summaries are
structured exactly like most papers: background, findings, and methods. Quick
and to the point. There is an incentive for both as the reader gets quality
info from the source and the researcher gains audience and exposure. We're at
the prototype stage Check it out abstra.co.uk, would love to have your
feedback!

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barbegal
The statistical analysis in this paper is really poor. Without the raw data I
would say it is impossible to tell anything from this study.

> change in citations at 1 year (Tweeted +3.1±2.4 vs. Non-Tweeted +0.7±1.3,
> p<0.001)

I don't know what that p<0.001 means in this context but there is certainly
more than a 0.1% chance that the null hypothesis (the two distributions are
the same) given those 95% confidence intervals.

The graphs that are used to illustrate the paper have completely different
confidence intervals than the numbers in the paper and look too good to be
true.

Given the average tweet was engaged with less than 16 times I really doubt
that the effect size would be this big. This looks to me to be the case that a
couple of good papers happened to be tweeted and that nothing statistically
significant can be gleaned from this paper.

Having said that I am not a professional statistician so I would appreciate
the input of someone more knowledgeable than myself.

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Will_Do
Yeah I agree this looks like one of those times where the researches aren't
interested in doing the stats at all so just mail it in.

Just ignoring the stats though the results seem pretty solid. 3x the number of
citations with ~100 observations. If the tweets were truly randomly assigned
and there aren't big outliers driving results (big ifs, not gonna go deep
enough to find out), their conclusion should be fine.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
This is actually very scary to me. This means that many papers citation list
is not a result of a thorough literature search but rather the authors
recalling papers they might have read or seen on social media. This is
dangerous in that if there were papers from before The Tweet era that actually
found that part of your research protocol was bad, they would not be found.

An example of this is the rat maze study that Feynman cites.

[http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm](http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm)

That last thing we need is clickbait science.

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LetThereBeNick
Unlike in the past, it’s impossible to read every paper in one’s field. Since
tools like PubMed, ISI, and Scopus all use a proprietary algorithm to rank
search results, I appreciate any alternative channels for bringing relevant
papers to my attention.

It’s also perfectly justified to search for papers solely based on how
influential they’ve been in your field. Papers which trend on Twitter (perhaps
long-awaited results) are already having an impact on labs, probably being
discussed in journal club and shaping the trajectory of the field.

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xxpor
PubMed is an interesting case, I wonder if the algorithm it uses for ranking
would be FOIAable

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choward
I find it ironic that this is about citations and it costs $36 just to read.
So if you wanted to cite this and somebody wanted to verify they would have to
spend another $36.

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joelthelion
Or they could use sci-hub

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awtawtwat3aw
as an outsider, it's always fun to read the research paper drama.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
This is really frightening for anyone who works in these fields but isn't on
any of the main social networks. I left facebook and co years ago and feel
much better for it. I get that marketing matters, but marketing on a shitshow
like twitter seems sanity challenging.

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eXpl0it3r
Twitter is what you make it to be. If you follow people that post a lot of
(angry) political stuff and you get yourself involved and also tweet about it,
then yes, things become quickly a shitshow. If you however look for people
that talk about stuff you're interested in or of your own field, then you can
get a lot of interesting conversations with people all over the world. Use the
unfollow button and/or mute option for people that bring too much negativity
to your feed and don't engage in negativity yourself.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
The problem is that (last time I looked) you can't only look at people's
tweets. You have to see people's retweets too. So most attempts to only see
certain aspects of twitter are too hard or incredibly limiting.

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eXpl0it3r
With TweetDeck [1] you can select whether you want to include retweets or not
[2], plus a lot of other useful options.

However, I think RTs enhance the experience a lot, as you get to discover
other people with similar interest kind of organically. But the same rule
applies to people who RT a lot of negativity heavy tweets, just unfollow of
mute them.

If you're interested, I recently wrote a bit about how I've been using Twitter
quite happily in the past few years [3].

[1] [https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/](https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/) [2]
[https://i.imgur.com/0GOMZvg.png](https://i.imgur.com/0GOMZvg.png) [3]
[https://dev.my-gate.net/2020/05/30/eight-years-on-twitter/](https://dev.my-
gate.net/2020/05/30/eight-years-on-twitter/)

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6gvONxR4sf7o
Thanks for the pointers. You've convinced me to try to give it another try.
Any idea whether there's a way to hide retweets from specific people while
allowing retweets from others? Like for people who tweet content on topics I
care about and retweet content on topics I want to stay away from? Like,
instead of muting someone, just muting their retweets.

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eXpl0it3r
I've not seen such a feature, but there are also a lot of third-party apps, so
maybe one offers such a feature.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
Cool. Thanks again for the tips :)

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Traster
I find this incredibly unsurprising, if you follow journalists on twitter
you'll hear the same thing over and over again. They say twitter is a
disaster, every time you say anything slightly controversial you'll get dozens
of random strangers attack you, and some will even permanently follow you
insulting you until you block them. They also say they can't leave because
it's one of the primary drivers of traffic to their articles and it would be
impossible to achieve the metrics their employer requires without it.

It seems a strange property that twitter has developed of being both a
terrible experience but also incredibly effective at organic advertising.

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DrAwdeOccarim
Ugh, this is so right. A lot of the trolls are also just new accounts the IRL
troll makes to keep harassing. And don't forget the bots and the hordes of
paid trolls employed by either companies or foreign governments to foment
decisiveness. It reminds me of the Simpson's episode when the teachers go on
strike and Bart runs through the angry mob yelling inflammatory and accusatory
tripe.

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captn3m0
[https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.athoracsur.2020.04.065](https://sci-
hub.se/10.1016/j.athoracsur.2020.04.065)

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6510
Tweeting improves citations

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shahinrostami
Perhaps a "relevant" paper "The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant
social media profile for scientists"
([https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...](https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-014-0424-0))

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barbegal
This is just a joke paper, there is no statistical analysis in it and the key
findings are: some scientists the author knows have more followers than
others.

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yassine_taw
I'm currently building an alternative to twitter to publish summaries of
papers. It's called Abstra. We're hoping to give researcher a better format to
share their stuff, and a quick option for that to avoid wasting time. Would
love to have your feedback! Abstra.co.uk

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sidravi1
I'd love to see the paper (but don't want to pay $36 for it). Citations are
often power-law distributed - I'd suspect one outliers is driving this effect.

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Iv
Tl;Dr : yes. Immensely. Almost 9 times.

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jigar24
Great case study!!

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founderling
Well, tweeting _where_?

If it is tweeted on an account with 0 followers, then certainly not, right?

And when tweeted to one millioin scientists in the same field, then certainly
yes, right?

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barbegal
> 4 articles were prospectively tweeted per day by a designated TSSMN
> (Thoracic Surgery Social Media Network) delegate and retweeted by all other
> TSSMN delegates (n=11) with a combined followership of 52,893 individuals
> and @TSSMN for 14 days

