Association of Twitter author Altmetric patterns with research impact in ophthalmology

Twitter has become increasingly popular within academia due to ease of use in disseminating accurate medical information, networking with colleagues, and promoting research. Given the rapidly increasing presence of ophthalmologists on social media platforms, we determined how Twitter patterns amongst authors, institutions, and journals affects the academic impact of ophthalmology research articles.

Data from 1086 research articles in the top 7 ophthalmology journals as determined by SCimago Journal Rank (SJR) was recorded for 2021 issues. Article citations, article captures, and Twitter metrics were retrospectively recorded using the Scopus database and PlumX Metrics on Scopus.

The number of citations and captures original research articles received had a significant positive correlation with the total tweets and retweets in general as well as self-tweets by authors of the article (p < 0.0001). Furthermore, articles tweeted by at least one author had a 1.7 fold increase in citations (p = 0.0012). While there was no significant effect on citations when a senior author or middle author tweeted about the publication, we observed a significantly greater number of citations when a first author tweeted about the publication (p = 0.0329). Both the author's affiliated institution and the journal tweeting about a publication were associated with more citations for that article (p < 0.0001 and p = 0.0025, respectively) and captures for that article (p < 0.0001 and p = 0.0025, respectively).

Twitter mentions of ophthalmology articles may reflect their future academic impact. Authors of recent ophthalmology publications, ophthalmology journals, academic institutions may benefit from promoting research articles on Twitter to increase visibility and citations.