Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

annalsthoracicsurgery.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 83 posts

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

#71

Post by yassine_taw »

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…

Same feeling here. That's why a friend of mine and I created Abstra. We ask authors to come and do some vulgarization themselves. The summaries are structured exactly like most papers: background, findings, and methods. Quick and to the point. There is an incentive for both as the reader gets quality info from the source and the researcher gains audience and exposure. We're at the prototype stage Check it out abstra.co.uk, would love to have your feedback!

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

#72

Post by matthewfcarlson »

tetris11 wrote: post #43
matthewfcarlson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two minute papers is fantastic! I just wish that all of the papers he covers had source code available. A few of them I've gotten excited about and hopped around the net to read the paper only to find no code available.

This is the state of science in a lot fields unfortunately. Many reviewers skim the paper, put in a thinly veiled complaint about why their own paper was not cited, and don't bother with the code. The code itself is always usually a mess: no readme, no license, random binaries, and a 'pipeline' which is simply a bunch of perl and python scripts cobbler together from snippets found on the web. People publish, then mov…

In my case, I'm not a researcher or even a computer scientist (EE). I'm just a person with a curiosity in various topics. I find the language in papers to be a big barrier. Even cludgy bad code in ten different languages is more readable to me than the strange symbols and vague diagrams.

I agree with you that this is research and there's no reason for it to be pretty. The fact that it's unsightly and brittle makes a lot of people reticent about sharing it online since it could reflect on the quality of their non prototype code. Maintenance is a large burden and once the original goal of the paper has been proved, there's little benefit to the researcher to keep the code around, so I understand why they might say let's not release it at all.

A recent example of this was I was building a gesture classifier using an accelerometer to generate data. I decided do use an svm as based on what I had read, it would be the simplest to port to the microcontroller I was using. I was getting decent performance but needed to extract better features. I found several papers talking about the topic with some novel ideas and their impressive results. While it was nice to know that accuracy could get that high, none of the papers explained how the features they extracted were made. It was usually a one or two sentence line about using both time and frequency domain data.

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

#73

Post by Will_Do »

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…

Yeah I agree this looks like one of those times where the researches aren't interested in doing the stats at all so just mail it in.

Just ignoring the stats though the results seem pretty solid. 3x the number of citations with ~100 observations. If the tweets were truly randomly assigned and there aren't big outliers driving results (big ifs, not gonna go deep enough to find out), their conclusion should be fine.

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

#74

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #41
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #32

This is really frightening for anyone who works in these fields but isn't on any of the main social networks. I left facebook and co years ago and feel much better for it. I get that marketing matters, but marketing on a shitshow like twitter seems sanity challenging.

Twitter is what you make it to be. If you follow people that post a lot of (angry) political stuff and you get yourself involved and also tweet about it, then yes, things become quickly a shitshow. If you however look for people that talk about stuff you're interested in or of your own field, then you can get a lot of interesting conversations with people all over the world. Use the unfollow button and/or mute option…

The problem is that (last time I looked) you can't only look at people's tweets. You have to see people's retweets too. So most attempts to only see certain aspects of twitter are too hard or incredibly limiting.

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

#75

Post by eXpl0it3r »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #74
eXpl0it3r wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is what you make it to be. If you follow people that post a lot of (angry) political stuff and you get yourself involved and also tweet about it, then yes, things become quickly a shitshow. If you however look for people that talk about stuff you're interested in or of your own field, then you can get a lot of interesting conversations with people all over the world. Use the unfollow button and/or mute option…

The problem is that (last time I looked) you can't only look at people's tweets. You have to see people's retweets too. So most attempts to only see certain aspects of twitter are too hard or incredibly limiting.

With TweetDeck [1] you can select whether you want to include retweets or not [2], plus a lot of other useful options.

However, I think RTs enhance the experience a lot, as you get to discover other people with similar interest kind of organically. But the same rule applies to people who RT a lot of negativity heavy tweets, just unfollow of mute them.

If you're interested, I recently wrote a bit about how I've been using Twitter quite happily in the past few years [3].

[1] https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ [2] https://i.imgur.com/0GOMZvg.png [3] https://dev.my-gate.net/2020/05/30/eight-years-on-twitter/

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

#76

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #75
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that (last time I looked) you can't only look at people's tweets. You have to see people's retweets too. So most attempts to only see certain aspects of twitter are too hard or incredibly limiting.

With TweetDeck [1] you can select whether you want to include retweets or not [2], plus a lot of other useful options. However, I think RTs enhance the experience a lot, as you get to discover other people with similar interest kind of organically. But the same rule applies to people who RT a lot of negativity heavy tweets, just unfollow of mute them. If you're interested, I recently wrote a bit about how I've been u…

Thanks for the pointers. You've convinced me to try to give it another try. Any idea whether there's a way to hide retweets from specific people while allowing retweets from others? Like for people who tweet content on topics I care about and retweet content on topics I want to stay away from? Like, instead of muting someone, just muting their retweets.

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

#77

Post by eXpl0it3r »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #76
eXpl0it3r wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With TweetDeck [1] you can select whether you want to include retweets or not [2], plus a lot of other useful options. However, I think RTs enhance the experience a lot, as you get to discover other people with similar interest kind of organically. But the same rule applies to people who RT a lot of negativity heavy tweets, just unfollow of mute them. If you're interested, I recently wrote a bit about how I've been u…

Thanks for the pointers. You've convinced me to try to give it another try. Any idea whether there's a way to hide retweets from specific people while allowing retweets from others? Like for people who tweet content on topics I care about and retweet content on topics I want to stay away from? Like, instead of muting someone, just muting their retweets.

I've not seen such a feature, but there are also a lot of third-party apps, so maybe one offers such a feature.

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

#78

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #77
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the pointers. You've convinced me to try to give it another try. Any idea whether there's a way to hide retweets from specific people while allowing retweets from others? Like for people who tweet content on topics I care about and retweet content on topics I want to stay away from? Like, instead of muting someone, just muting their retweets.

I've not seen such a feature, but there are also a lot of third-party apps, so maybe one offers such a feature.

Cool. Thanks again for the tips :)

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

#80

Post by sooheon »

Swizec wrote: post #35
sooheon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size of impact is orthogonal to quality of impact, people who chase social stats seem to forget this fact.

Who said anything about social stats? Levitt in particular says he feels like his research can have a bigger impact if it’s shared broadly with people than if it reaches 10 other academics and that’s it. We’re not talking about likes on social media, we’re talking about breadth of audience for academic research and how scientists can do better than chasing meaningless citation stats. Levitt talks about his thought pr…

> Who said anything about social stats?

You did.

> Dubner went went down the podcaster route. 15 years later, Dubner has reached millions of people [...]

I assume this is measured in terms of subscribers or listen counts.

I'm not saying the Freakonomics Stevens have/haven't had quality contributions to the world, I'm not even saying anything w.r.t. average podcast quality vs. average academic paper quality. I'm only saying that people often measure impact along only one dimension.

Post reply on HN