Sharing a research paper on X/Twitter may increase engagement, but it does not increase citations, according to a recent study shared on Nature. Over the course of ten months, researchers shared randomly selected primary research articles and reviews on their personal accounts. Three years later, they compared the statistics of each shared article with other articles from the same journal editions. They found that the shared articles had higher daily download values, but similar citation rates to the control articles. The findings reportedly echo a similar study that was conducted in 2013 by University of Ottawa scholar Stefanie Haustein. “We actually showed that a lot of the counts on Twitter you would get were bots, it wasn’t even humans,” said Haustein of the 2013 study.
