Abstract
An analysis of article-level metrics of 27,856 PLOS ONE articles reveals that the number of tweets was weakly associated with the number of citations (β = 0.10), and weakly negatively associated with citations when the number of article views was held constant (β = −0.06). The number of tweets was predictive of other social media activity (β = 0.34 for Mendeley and β = 0.41 for Facebook), but not of the number of article views on PubMed Central (β = 0.01). It is concluded that the scientific citation process acts relatively independently of the social dynamics on Twitter.
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de Winter, J.C.F. The relationship between tweets, citations, and article views for PLOS ONE articles. Scientometrics 102, 1773–1779 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1445-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1445-x