Login to Access Video or Poster Abstract: MP69-05
Sources of Funding: None

Introduction

Social media use has dramatically increased in academic medicine with over 70% of journals now using Twitter accounts. This calls into question if there is a measurable association between academic impact and Twitter use. We sought to quantify the relationship between the number of Twitter mentions and the number of academic citations a urology publication receives.

Methods

213 papers from 7 prominent urology journals were examined 18 months after publication from December 2014-January 2015. Articles were evaluated with 2 citation based "bibliometrics"(Scopus, Google Scholar) and 1 social media based metric (Altmetric). Altmetric software allowed for individual tweets regarding an article to be examined. Scores and Twitter mentions were compared using one way ANOVA and bivariate fit analysis.

Results

73% of articles had at least 1 twitter mention. These articles were found to have 2.0 fold more Scopus citations (p < 0.01), 2.1 fold more Google Scholar citations (p < 0.01), and 27.8 fold higher Altmetric scores (p < 0.001) compared to articles with no Twitter mentions. There was a positive correlation between the number of Twitter mentions and the number of citations on Scopus (R= 0.328, p<0.01) and Google Scholar (R=0.348, p<0.01). This relationship remained significant when controlling for journal impact factor. 9% of authors self-tweeted their own publications. Authors self-tweeting articles was associated with an increased number of citations, with a 6.5 and 4.6 mean citation increase in Google Scholar and Scopus scores (p = 0.02 and p < 0.01) compared to non-self-tweeted articles.

Conclusions

The majority of urology publications are being shared on Twitter. The number of citations a urologic publication receives is associated with the number of mentions it has on Twitter. Authors self-tweeting articles may be a factor that increases paper visibility and academic impact.

Funding

None