Correlation Between Social Media Posts and Academic Citations of Orthopaedic Research

The objectives of this study were to quantify adoption of social media for the dissemination of original research in orthopaedic research and to determine the correlation between academic citations and social medial posts among recent orthopaedic publications.

An Internet-based study was performed of 835 articles from three orthopaedic journals from 2018 to 2019. The number of academic citations for each article was determined using Google Scholar and Web of Science. The number of social media posts was determined using Twitter. The correlation between academic citations and social media posts was calculated using the Spearman rank correlation coefficient.

The average number of academic citations per article was 4.6 on Google Scholar and 2.6 on Web of Science. The average number of social media posts per article was 3.6, which consisted of 1.1 tweets and 2.5 retweets. The number of academic citations per article was weakly correlated with the number of social media posts, tweets, and retweets.

There is a positive relationship between social media posts and academic citations of recent orthopaedic research. Use of social media differs among journals and authors, which may represent opportunities to leverage social media platforms to more effectively dissemination novel research findings.