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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

#61

Post by mhandley »

alextheparrot wrote: post #28
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.

What's interesting is that I didn't make that video for a general audience. I made it for the networking research community, so I didn't bother to explain what Dijkstra's algorithm is, or any of the basics really. There are also a number of graphs which conventional wisdom says should not be in a video for a general audience. Turns out we often underestimate the large niche technical-but-not-specialist audience which doesn't mind things not being dumbed down too much.

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

#62

Post by mhandley »

the_omegist wrote: post #44
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's a noble practice but I think everyone should stick at what he does best, for a better overall efficiency. As long as you make your paper easily available, as another commenter said, another person can make it more comprehensible for the general public. One of the causes of the slowdown (even if marginal) of science and research in general is the administrative and social media overlays that were added to them.

A typical computer systems research project takes two years, though many take a lot more. After several years research, we write a paper like it's 1920, spend a day knocking together some powerpoint slides, and give a 20-minute presentation at some conference (and those are the successful projects). Science, whether pure or applied, is about pushing forward the bounds of knowledge and then, crucially, communicating those insights. There are so many papers published these days - one of my papers has been cited over 10,000 times - that's an average of 1.5 times a day for 19 years straight. Seems unlikely most of those papers ever get read. If you still believe in the work once it's published, you really should do your best to communicate your excitement to others. Unless you made a huge breakthough (unlikely in any field), no-one else is going to learn from your insights otherwise.

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

#63

Post by mrmrcoleman »

yutopia wrote: post #27
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.

This is pretty much guaranteed to happen as explained by “the medium is the message”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

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

#64

Post by yutopia »

n4r9 wrote: post #42
yutopia wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if there's an inverse relationship between the level of pressure on scientists to publish, tweet, blog and demonstrate the social relevance of their work, and groundbreaking advances in fundamental physics.

There was an opinion piece on PNAS a few years ago that argued just that, no hard evidence though:

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/34/9384

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

#65

Post by BorisTheBrave »

barbegal wrote: post #54

The statistical analysis in this paper is really poor. Without the raw data I would say it is impossible to tell anything from this study. > change in citations at 1 year (Tweeted +3.1±2.4 vs. Non-Tweeted +0.7±1.3, p I don't know what that p The graphs that are used to illustrate the paper have completely different confidence intervals than the numbers in the paper and look too good to be true. Given the average twee…

Perhaps ±2.4 is the estimated population standard deviation of the tweeted group, rather than a confidence interval. The confidence interval could be the smaller value you seein the charts.

Two distributions can overlap a lot and still have a low p-value for anova etc if there are enough data points.

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

#66

Post by adwww »

azhenley wrote: post #23
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.

Except this one.

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

#67

Post by 0d9eooo »

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…

Unfortunately, I think we're already at a clickbait science level to some extent in some fields, depending on what you mean by "clickbait".

This effect would have to be replicated in some form to understand its boundaries better but if it were to generalize I think it has much broader implications than just Twitter and thoracic surgery.

There have been lots of bibliometric studies of citation impact etc. but this is one of the first times I've seen an actual experimental study in academics of this sort of thing, and it confirms what a lot of people have been experiencing, which is that actual scientific quality is only part of the reason why some work gets lots of attention. Replace twitter with other forms of social networking and the implications become clear.

There's ups and downs to this: maybe some underappreciated work would get more attention if it's marketed more, for example. But it speaks to the role of things outside of the domain of study per se (not sure what the term for this would be -- something like nondiagetic but for scientific content).

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

#68

Post by mathattack »

Swizec wrote: post #30
mathattack wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

This sounds like an empirical side project rather than leaving academia, no? Has it been long enough to see the results?

Interesting that they put their hopes on data fluency on the College Board while the SATs are falling out of fashion.

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

#69

Post by jessriedel »

mhandley wrote: post #18
jessriedel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, there are gradations to "the wider world". I don't know about you, but I read a lot of stuff that's way outside my area. That's why I hang out here. There's a huge gulf between "suitable for mainstream TV" and the opaque and overly compacted research paper. Places like New Scientist and Ars Technica fill this gap to some extent, but they tend to oversimplify to appeal to a wider audience. I'd rather hear it fro…

Even as an ambitious and educated outsider, the stuff you're looking at is almost certainly not representative of most research in those respective fields. When weighted by pages, most research is boring and truly only of interest to the few dozen of specialized researchers in that subfield.

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

#70

Post by yassine_taw »

I'm currently building an alternative to twitter to publish summaries of papers. It's called Abstra. We're hoping to give researcher a better format to share their stuff, and a quick option for that to avoid wasting time. Would love to have your feedback! Abstra.co.uk
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