Twitter Mentions and Academic Citations in the Urologic Literature

To quantify the relationship between the number of Twitter mentions and the number of academic citations a urologic publication receives.

Two hundred and thirteen papers from 7 prominent urologic journals were examined 37 months after publication. Articles were evaluated with 2 citation based "bibliometrics" (Scopus, Google Scholar) and Twitter mentions were tracked using the Altmetric Bookmarklet. The number of article citations and Twitter mentions were compared using one-way Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and bivariate fit analysis.

Seventy-three percent of articles had at least 1 Twitter mention. Forty-two percent of Twitter mentions occurred within the first week of the online publication date. Articles mentioned on Twitter had 2.0-fold more Scopus citations (P <.01), and 2.3-fold more Google Scholar citations (P <. 01) compared to articles with no Twitter mentions. Female urologic articles had the greatest number of Twitter mentions (5.7 mentions/article) while pediatric urology had the fewest mean number of Twitter mentions (0.8 mentions/article). A total of 8.9% of papers were tweeted by their authors. Author tweeted articles were associated with a 12.3 (2.0-fold) and 15.5 (1.8-fold) mean citation increase for Scopus and Google Scholar (P <. 01 and P = . 01) compared to articles not shared by their authors on Twitter.

The majority of urologic publications are being shared on Twitter. The number of citations a urologic publication receives up to 3 years after release is positively associated with the number of mentions it has on Twitter. Twitter activity may be an early indicator of ultimate academic impact of an academic urologic paper.