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Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial

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Re: Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial

#21

Post by xxpor »

LetThereBeNick wrote: post #15
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #11

This is actually very scary to me. This means that many papers citation list is not a result of a thorough literature search but rather the authors recalling papers they might have read or seen on social media. This is dangerous in that if there were papers from before The Tweet era that actually found that part of your research protocol was bad, they would not be found. An example of this is the rat maze study that…

Unlike in the past, it’s impossible to read every paper in one’s field. Since tools like PubMed, ISI, and Scopus all use a proprietary algorithm to rank search results, I appreciate any alternative channels for bringing relevant papers to my attention. It’s also perfectly justified to search for papers solely based on how influential they’ve been in your field. Papers which trend on Twitter (perhaps long-awaited resu…

PubMed is an interesting case, I wonder if the algorithm it uses for ranking would be FOIAable

Re: Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial

#22

Post by mathattack »

Swizec wrote: post #9
mhandley wrote: post #7

The research community really should do a better job of engaging with the wider world, irrespective of whether it increases citations. For example, I had this paper in Hotnets 2019, and about 80 people saw my presentation. But I also spent some time, turned it into a little video and put it on YouTube. 360,000 people have seen it there. Now the subtleties were probably lost on many of those people, but if only a few…

This reminds me of a story from Steven Levitt. He published Freakonomics together with Stephen Dubner then went back into academia while Dubner went down the podcaster route. 15 years later, Dubner has reached millions of people with his work and Levitt recently started a podcast and soft quit academia after realizing that one of his best papers after years of research and hard work got 3 citations. He assumes fewer…

Levitt is leaving academia? Wow - that’s news!

Re: Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial

#23

Post by azhenley »

choward wrote: post #2

I find it ironic that this is about citations and it costs $36 just to read. So if you wanted to cite this and somebody wanted to verify they would have to spend another $36.

Most authors put the preprint on their website for free. Almost every paper I try to read can be found on Google Scholar.

Re: Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial

#24

Post by catalogia »

Pfhreak wrote: post #17
jessriedel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most research is not useful or suitable to the wider world.

I guarantee a cottage industry of YouTubers would pop up digesting and rewrapping that content. Today, it's probably too inaccessible for them to do so.

I sincerely doubt it. There is much more that is published than the general public has an appetite for. Even in a narrow scope, people have a limited appetite for any particular form of content before they're satiated. If too much content is produced for any particular topic, people will burn out and tune out.

Re: Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial

#25

Post by jacobolus »

jessriedel wrote: post #16
mhandley wrote: post #7

The research community really should do a better job of engaging with the wider world, irrespective of whether it increases citations. For example, I had this paper in Hotnets 2019, and about 80 people saw my presentation. But I also spent some time, turned it into a little video and put it on YouTube. 360,000 people have seen it there. Now the subtleties were probably lost on many of those people, but if only a few…

Most research is not useful or suitable to the wider world.

I spend a lot of time reading research papers in various fields that the original authors were not directing toward me as an imagined audience, and get plenty of value from papers that could be called “unsuitable to the wider world”.

The ability to use the web, citation indices, etc. to discover and read papers has made the whole of the scholarly literature much more useful to me than it would have been a few decades ago.

Re: Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial

#26

Post by cameronbrown »

Pfhreak wrote: post #17
jessriedel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most research is not useful or suitable to the wider world.

I guarantee a cottage industry of YouTubers would pop up digesting and rewrapping that content. Today, it's probably too inaccessible for them to do so.

Two Minute Papers is a great example of this:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg

Re: Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial

#27

Post by yutopia »

mhandley wrote: post #7

The research community really should do a better job of engaging with the wider world, irrespective of whether it increases citations. For example, I had this paper in Hotnets 2019, and about 80 people saw my presentation. But I also spent some time, turned it into a little video and put it on YouTube. 360,000 people have seen it there. Now the subtleties were probably lost on many of those people, but if only a few…

I think the general trend of researchers becoming more media-savvy is great. But I also get the sense that researchers are increasingly choosing to work on Twitter-friendly topics (e.g., sensational, visually striking, reducible to sound bites) — whether that’s also positive I’m not so sure.

Re: Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial

#28

Post by alextheparrot »

mhandley wrote: post #7

The research community really should do a better job of engaging with the wider world, irrespective of whether it increases citations. For example, I had this paper in Hotnets 2019, and about 80 people saw my presentation. But I also spent some time, turned it into a little video and put it on YouTube. 360,000 people have seen it there. Now the subtleties were probably lost on many of those people, but if only a few…

That video is brilliant, by the way. I just watched it all the way through — it makes sense that a video that had such a high learning bandwidth (For lack of a better term) gets so many views.

Re: Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial

#29

Post by Swizec »

sidr wrote: post #20
Swizec wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a story from Steven Levitt. He published Freakonomics together with Stephen Dubner then went back into academia while Dubner went down the podcaster route. 15 years later, Dubner has reached millions of people with his work and Levitt recently started a podcast and soft quit academia after realizing that one of his best papers after years of research and hard work got 3 citations. He assumes fewer…

I'm not sure why number of views/reads is the metric to optimize for, though. I'm sure more people listen to the Joe Rogan Experience than have read a Mathematical Theory of Communication. Does that intrinsically make it worth more?

Depends on your goals. Do you want to have impact or chase obscure brain teasers?

Re: Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results from a Randomized Trial

#30

Post by Swizec »

mathattack wrote: post #22
Swizec wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a story from Steven Levitt. He published Freakonomics together with Stephen Dubner then went back into academia while Dubner went down the podcaster route. 15 years later, Dubner has reached millions of people with his work and Levitt recently started a podcast and soft quit academia after realizing that one of his best papers after years of research and hard work got 3 citations. He assumes fewer…

Levitt is leaving academia? Wow - that’s news!

Might be more of a sabbatical.

This is the Freakonomics episode where he talked about this https://freakonomics.com/podcast/math-curriculum/

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