To get cited or get tweeted: a study of psychological academic articles

Purpose By analyzing journal articles with high citation counts but low Twitter mentions and vice versa, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overall picture of differences between citation counts and Twitter mentions of academic articles. Design/methodology/approach Citation counts from the Web of Science and Twitter mentions of psychological articles under the Social Science Citation Index collection were collected for data analysis. An approach combining both statistical and simple content analysis was adopted to examine important factors contributing to citation counts and Twitter mentions, as well as the patterns of tweets mentioning academic articles. Findings Compared to citation counts, Twitter mentions have stronger affiliations with readability and accessibility of academic papers. Readability here was defined as the content size of articles and the usage of jargon and scientific expressions. In addition, Twitter activities, such as the use of hashtags and user mentions, could better facilitate the sharing of articles. Even though discussions of articles or related social phenomena were spotted in the contents of tweets, simple counts of Twitter mentions may not be reliable enough for research evaluations due to issues such as Twitter bots and a deficient understanding of Twitter users’ motivations for mentioning academic articles on Twitter. Originality/value This study has elaborated on the differences between Twitter mentions and citation counts by comparing the characteristics of Twitter-inclined and citation-inclined articles. It provides useful information for interested parties who would like to adopt social web metrics such as Twitter mentions as traces of broader engagement with academic literature and potential suggestions to increase the reliability of Twitter metrics. In addition, it gives specific tips for researchers to increase research visibility and get attention from the general public on Twitter.