Comments on: Twimpact factors: can tweets really predict citations? https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj-journals-development-blog/2012/01/06/twimpact-factors-can-tweets-really-predict-citations/ BMJ Web Development Blog Tue, 01 Jul 2014 05:21:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.1.1 By: The best Open Access policies put researchers in charge, and recent EU Horizon 2020 and COST policies support this | EUROPP https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj-journals-development-blog/2012/01/06/twimpact-factors-can-tweets-really-predict-citations/comment-page-1/#comment-239 Sat, 21 Dec 2013 10:00:31 +0000 https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj-journals-development-blog/?p=2779#comment-239 […] standing of a newly published paper is decided in the matter of a dozen tweets (see Eysenbach and Bower). When choosing an outlet for a ‘hot’ research finding, some scholars now consider reputable, […]

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By: Gunther Eysenbach https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj-journals-development-blog/2012/01/06/twimpact-factors-can-tweets-really-predict-citations/comment-page-1/#comment-115 Sat, 07 Jan 2012 02:45:13 +0000 https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj-journals-development-blog/?p=2779#comment-115 a) “There are far fewer barriers to microblogging than creating an article citation” – this is not a critique about the study (in terms of questioning the validity of the correlation findings), but about the usefulness of the twimpact factor going forward (potential to game the system etc.). These points are discussed in the paper.

b) “Eysenbach has purchased several domain names..”.
Yes, I disclosed this in the conflict of interest section. I created some neologisms in the paper and I registered them to avoid that they are highjacked. These domains are inactive. We might use them in to display twimpact factors of JMIR articles and/or other articles in the future (similar to what we currently display at http://www.jmir.org/stats/most…, but with a better interface). I am not sure how this can be a valid “critique” point of the study. How many other research groups own domain names related to their research without even disclosing this fact? In hindsight, I should probably not even have mentioned this. The comment ““it becomes hard to separate the paper’s contribution to science from its contribution to entrepreneurship”.” is quite cynical given that many great products (Google etc.) are based on science. And there is nothing wrong with entrepreneurship as a means to turn ideas and research findings into useful products and services.

c) “serial self citation” (on a journal level) – most editorials discuss and cite papers published in their own journal. This is an editorial exploring and discussing the impact of a series of JMIR papers – impact in terms of social media response and citations, something that has not been done before. The 55 papers which we analyzed are cited because we thought it is important for the reader to be able to readily determine which article title falls into what cell in the 2×2 grid (highly cited/highly tweeted, highly tweeted/low cited etc). Neither author, two peer-reviewers, and the independent editor handling this manuscript thought of this as “offending” or “suspicious”.
JMIR has already a great impact factor (4.7) and is top-ranked in its discipline – we do not need to engage in impact factor gaming, as the cynical comment on “serial self-citation” suggests. Having said that, as you mentioned, a correction has been issued within 3 weeks after publication and before submitting the paper to various bibliographic databases, with moving the references into an extra file. For us, this seems a rather artificial move bowing to the tyranny of the impact factor and citation analysis (citing references deliberately not in the references section only to not skew the impact factor). This just strengthens the point of the paper that additional metrics (in addition to, not instead of, citation analysis) might not be a bad idea.

Unfortunately, these “critique” points are less a critique of the science, but fall more into the category of throwing dirt at us to see what sticks. Many commenters on the Scholarly Kitchen blog have their own agenda and conflicts of interests (not always disclosed on the blog), and readers should be careful to take these into account as well.

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