Correlation between Academic Citations in Emergency Medicine Journals and Twitter mentions

Abstract

Introduction: Twitter may be used in disseminating scientific information that can be measured via citations by traditional systems. We aimed to investigate the relationship between Twitter mentions, traditional citations including Google Scholar and Scopus, and the metric value of Altmetric for articles published in emergency medicine journals.

Methods: Articles published in emergency medicine journals between January 2018 and June 2018 were retrospectively analyzed in February 2021. Journals included with an impact factor of >1 and indexed in Q1. Metric data about citations in Google Scholar and Scopus, the metric value of the Altmetric system, and Twitter mentions were obtained.

Results: There were 502 articles published in different seven emergency medicine journals. Fifty-four articles (10.8%) were never cited in Google Scholar or Scopus. There were 79 articles (15.7%) without Twitter mention. Twitter mentions as a tweet or no tweet impacted the number of articles with citation (p > 0.05). The number of citations per article was significantly higher in articles with Twitter mentions (p = 0.002 for Google Scholar citations, p = 0.005 for Scopus citations). Altmetric cited articles were significantly higher for articles with Twitter mentions (p < 0.001). There were significant positive correlations between the number of Twitter mentions and citations in Scopus (r = 0.30, p < 0.001), in both Google Scholar and Scopus (r = 0.19, p < 0.001), and in Altmetrics (r = 0.852, p < 0.001).

Conclusion: There were positive correlations between numbers of Twitter mentions, traditional citations, including Google Scholar and Scopus, and metric values of the Altmetric system. This finding supports that increased social media citations are associated with increased dissemination and disclosure of publications.

Keywords: Citations; Digital platforms; Digital scholarship; Scientometrics; Social media.