PD30-10: Are Academic Medicine Social Media Influencers Actually Influencing Citation Rates?

Shirley Wang*, Baltimore, MD, Christopher Meilchen, Galveston, TX, Pranjal Agrawal, Mary Rostom, Gaurish Agrawal, Baltimore, MD, Justin M Dubin, Chicago, IL, Andrew T Gabrielson, Taylor P Kohn, Baltimore, MD

Introduction: Multiple studies have found that social media (SoMe) dissemination of published literature may be associated with higher future citation rates, however it is unclear what role influential figures on SoMe play in driving this phenomenon.

Methods: All original articles published in Journal of Urology (JU) and European Urology (EU) in the year 2018 were identified. Reviews, guidelines, and editorials were excluded. For each article, SoMe mentions, followers per tweet, total citations, and article characteristics were extracted through July 2021 via Altmetric. Influential SoMe figures were identified as accounts that tweeted about JU or EU articles with >2000 followers on Twitter with account characteristics collected including total followers, total tweets, engagement statistics, account verification status, and if an official journal account, physician account, or urology specific account.

Results: We identified 394 articles with 8,895 total citations which generated 14,119 SoMe posts -  13,128 of which were tweets with 33,028,427 combined followers who could have seen these tweets. 478 Twitter SoMe influencers were identified. On panel data regression modeling, tweets about a specific article were positively associated with future citation (estimate: 0.17 – i.e. our model predicts 0.17 future citations per tweet about an article, p<0.001) but total followers per tweet was not associated with future citations (p>0.05). News article and blog posts were also associated with future citations (estimate: 0.35 and 2.7 citations per post, respectively, p<0.001). Overwhelmingly, characteristics of the article such as prospective studies (estimate: 12.9 citations more than cross sectional studies), open access status (estimate: 4.3 citations more if open access), and previously well published authors (estimate: 3.6E-04 future citations per past citation – so 10,000 past citations would predict 3.6 future citations) (p < 0.001 for all) were more predictive of future citations than nearly all characteristics of SoMe influencers (Table 1).

Conclusions: While SoMe posts are associated with future citations, there was no correlation between who is posting the tweets and future citations. SoMe posts may celebrate strong published articles but posts by academic SoMe influencers do not appear to drive future citations.

Source of Funding: None