Open AccessUsing social media to promote academic research: Identifying the benefits of twitter for sharing academic work
Author(s) -
Samara Klar,
Yanna Krupnikov,
Joseph B. Ryan,
Kathleen Searles,
Yotam Shmargad
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0229446
Subject(s) - citation , social media , microblogging , scholarly communication , dissemination , tracking (education) , information dissemination , altmetrics , public relations , citation analysis , politics , sociology , audience measurement , work (physics) , media studies , political science , data science , publishing , world wide web , computer science , pedagogy , law , mechanical engineering , engineering
To disseminate research, scholars once relied on university media services or journal press releases, but today any academic can turn to Twitter to share their published work with a broader audience. The possibility that scholars can push their research out, rather than hope that it is pulled in, holds the potential for scholars to draw wide attention to their research. In this manuscript, we examine whether there are systematic differences in the types of scholars who most benefit from this push model. Specifically, we investigate the extent to which there are gender differences in the dissemination of research via Twitter. We carry out our analyses by tracking tweet patterns for articles published in six journals across two fields (political science and communication), and we pair this Twitter data with demographic and educational data about the authors of the published articles, as well as article citation rates. We find considerable evidence that, overall, article citations are positively correlated with tweets about the article, and we find little evidence to suggest that author gender affects the transmission of research in this new media.