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Correlation between Twitter mentions and academic citations in sexual medicine journals

International Journal of Impotence Research volume 34, pages 593–598 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Social media services, especially Twitter, are used as a commonly sharing tool in the scientific world. This widespread use of Twitter would be an effective method in spreading academic publications. So, we aimed to investigate the relationship between Twitter mentions and traditional citations of articles in sexual medicine journals in this study. We reviewed the articles published in seven journals of sexual medicine (2 years after the publication of the articles) between January 2018 and June 2018. In the first half of 2018, 410 articles were extracted. Of these, 352 (85.9%) were original articles, while 58 (14.1%) were review articles. The median number of citations of the articles mentioned at least once on Twitter was 7 (interquartile range: 0–111) for Google Scholar, whereas it was 0 (interquartile range: 0–63) for Scopus, respectively. It was 4 (interquartile range: 0–25) for Google Scholar and 0 (interquartile range: 0–7) for Scopus. The publications mentioned on Twitter were cited more than the non-mentioned publications in the traditional-based citation system (p < 0.001). A significant relationship between the citation numbers and tweet numbers was also observed (p < 0.001). Also, in the linear regression model, the tweet numbers (p < 0.001) and article types (p < 0.001) were found to be related to the Google Scholar citation numbers. In conclusion, using Twitter as a professional tool in academic life would allow information to be propagated and responded quickly, especially for sexual medicine journals.

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Fig. 1: The association of Google Scholar citations and the tweet numbers.
Fig. 2: The association between the number of tweets and Google Scholar and Scopus citations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Urology, Konya City Hospital, Konya, Turkey

    Mehmet Serkan Ozkent

  2. Department of Urology, Selcuk University, School of Medicine, Konya, Turkey

    Kadir Böcü, Emre Altintas & Murat Gul

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  1. Mehmet Serkan Ozkent
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  2. Kadir Böcü
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  3. Emre Altintas
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  4. Murat Gul
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Correspondence to Murat Gul.

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Ozkent, M.S., Böcü, K., Altintas, E. et al. Correlation between Twitter mentions and academic citations in sexual medicine journals. Int J Impot Res 34, 593–598 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41443-021-00457-0

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