{"id":923,"date":"2012-01-05T19:20:28","date_gmt":"2012-01-05T19:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/?p=923"},"modified":"2012-01-05T19:20:28","modified_gmt":"2012-01-05T19:20:28","slug":"how-are-your-tweetations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2012\/01\/05\/how-are-your-tweetations\/","title":{"rendered":"How are your tweetations?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jmir.org\/2011\/4\/e123\/\">contentious paper <\/a>came out towards the end of last year in the <em>Journal of Medical Internet Research<\/em>. That is a reasonably respectable title in its niche field and the author, Gunther Eysenbach, is a respected medical informaticist and e-health guru.<\/p>\n<p>At first I loved the paper for its wonderfully silly and memorable neologisms. It talks of &#8220;tweetations&#8221; and &#8220;twimpact factors&#8221;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>a tweetation is &#8220;a citation in a tweet (mentioning a journal article URL)&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>the twimpact factor is &#8220;the cumulative number of tweetations 7 days after publication of the article&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But disillusion quickly set in. The paper reports an analysis of the effect that tweeting about a research paper has on the subsequent number of citations to that paper. It concludes that:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication. Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations, but the true use of these metrics is to measure the distinct concept of social impact.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Phil Davis, at The Scholarly Kitchen blog, <a href=\"http:\/\/scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org\/2012\/01\/04\/tweets-and-our-obsession-with-alt-metrics\/\">points out<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The main message of the paper is that highly tweeted articles were 11 times more likely to be highly cited, a result that makes a great 140 character headline but needs much more context for interpretation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>My main concern is that the group of articles being studied are articles published in the <em>Journal of Medical Internet Research<\/em> &#8211; 55 articles published in 2009 and 2010. Hence the results may not reflect the reality of broader biomedical research publishing. To be fair, Eysenbach acknowledges this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>as a journal about the Internet and social media [JMIR] has a sophisticated readership that is generally ahead of the curve in adopting Web 2.0 tools. However, this also limits the generalizability of these results: what works for this journal may not work for other journals, in particular journals that &#8230; do not have an active Twitter user base. &#8230;Journals that publish non-Internet-related articles have probably far lower tweetation rates per article, and it is also less likely that people tweet about articles that are not open access.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Davis has other reservations, noting that there is a highly-skewed distribution of tweets and citations and that many of the tweets studied were sent out automatically. The comments thread to his post has other trenchant criticism of the paper and a defence from Eysenbach.<\/p>\n<p>Davis also questions the ethics of the inclusion in the reference list of citations to all the 55 papers studied. This has now changed &#8211; JMIR has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jmir.org\/2012\/1\/e7\/\" rel=\"nofollow\">issued a correction of the original article<\/a>, removing the offending citations to dataset articles, and replacing them with a list of articles in an appendix..<\/p>\n<p>The main point Eysenbach makes seem to be that &#8220;buzz in the blogosphere is measurable&#8221;, and his definitions of tweetation etc may be helpful to future studies of the broader literature, even if the actual numbers he has generated are not generalisable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A contentious paper came out towards the end of last year in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. That is a reasonably respectable title in its niche field and the author, Gunther Eysenbach, is a respected medical informaticist and e-health &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2012\/01\/05\/how-are-your-tweetations\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bibliometrics-etc","category-journal-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}