Several of us overly online biologists spent years quietly doing an experiment on Twitter, trying to find out if tweeting about new studies from a set of mid-range journals caused an increase in later citations, compared to set of untweeted control articles.

Turns out we had no noticeable effect; the tweeted papers were cited at the same rate as the control set.

Our paper, headed by Trevor Branch, was published today in PLOS One:

#SciComm #Twitter #X #Science

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0292201

Controlled experiment finds no detectable citation bump from Twitter promotion

Multiple studies across a variety of scientific disciplines have shown that the number of times that a paper is shared on Twitter (now called X) is correlated with the number of citations that paper receives.

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