Tweet success? Scientific communication correlates with increased citations in Ecology and Conservation

Abstract

Science communication is seen as critical for the disciplines of ecology and conservation, where research products are often used to shape policy and decision making. Scientists are increasing their online media communication, via social media and news. Such media engagement has been thought to influence or predict traditional metrics of scholarship, such as citation rates. Here, we measure the association between citation rates and the Altmetric Attention Score-an indicator of the amount and reach of the attention an article has received-along with other forms of bibliometric performance (year published, journal impact factor, and article type). We found that Attention Score was positively correlated with citation rates. However, in recent years, we detected increasing media exposure did not relate to the equivalent citations as in earlier years; signalling a diminishing return on investment. Citations correlated with journal impact factors up to ∼13, but then plateaued, demonstrating that maximizing citations does not require publishing in the highest-impact journals. We conclude that ecology and conservation researchers can increase exposure of their research through social media engagement and, simultaneously, enhance their performance under traditional measures of scholarly activity.

Keywords: Altmetric; Enter a keyword; Science communication; Social media; Twitter.

Figure 1. Summary stats.

(A) Histogram of Attention Scores for 8,322 ecology and conservation articles published between 2005–2010. Attention Scores were truncated at 300, however, the maximum score for this period was 1,219. 28 articles had Attention Scores exceeding 300. (B) Average Attention Score for ecology and conservation articles between 2005–2015. 95% confidence interval shown in grey. (C) Composition of media sources in Attention Scores between 2005–2015. Starting in 2010, Attention Scores were increasingly composed of tweets from Twitter. By 2015, 70% of the total Attention Score was composed of Tweets.

Figure 2. Relative influence.

(A) Relative influence of predictive variables, shown for articles published from 2005–2009, and between 2010–2015. Relative influence is measured by relative # of times variables included in trees weighted by the square root of improvement to the model, averaged over all trees (Elith, Leathwick & Hastie, 2008). (B) Relative influence of individual media sources on citation rates for the entire period of interest (2005–2015). Policy documents omitted.

Figure 3. Response plots.

Response plots showing direction, shape, and magnitude of effects on citation rates. (A) 2005–2009, (B) 2010–2015. We varied each variable from max to min, while fixing the remaining variables at their mean (Attention Score = 10.8, Journal Impact Factor = 4.4, Years Since Published = 5, and Document Type = Article). We quantified the estimated gain in citations per unit increase in Attention Scores during the 2010–2015 period. Assuming 5 years since publication, we estimate the effect of increasing Attention Score on citation rates for three ranges of Attention Scores: low (0–50); moderate (50–540); high (540+). For low Attention Score ranges, every per-unit increase in Attention produces 0.47 citations, requiring about 21 Attention points for each 10-unit increase in citations. For moderate Attention Score ranges, every per-unit increase in Attention Score produces 0.07 citations, such that it takes about 143 Attention points for each 10-unit increase in citations. For high Attention Score ranges, there was no change in citation rates with increasing Attention Score. Attention Scores during the 2005–2009 period were associated with up to four times more citations than the same Score during the more recent 2010–2015 period.