e-Xploration

Many scientists are making the move towards social media in order to accelerate  and amplify their scientific impact (Fausto et al. 2012; Fox 2012; Piwowar 2013). One in 40 scientists is active on Twitter (Priem et al. 2012a), 25,000 blog entries have been indexed on the Research Blogging platform, and 2 million scientists are using Mendeley, a reference sharing tool (Piwowar 2013). Here, we consider 140 how social media, and Twitter in particular, can influence the life cycle of scientific publication, from inception and collaboration on a spark of an idea to the communication of a finished product. Specifically, we evaluate and discuss the benefits of Twitter for (1) increasing scholarly connections and networks, (2) quickly developing ideas through novel collaborations and pre-review, and (3) amplifying the dissemination and discussion of scientific knowledge both within and beyond the ivory tower of academia.

The impact of scientific papers has traditionally been measured in terms of
numbers of citations (Neylon and Wu 2009). Tweeting can influence this impact metric. For example, articles published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research that were tweeted about frequently in the first three days following publication were 11 times more likely to be highly cited 17 to 29 months later than  less tweeted articles (Eysenbach 2011). In fact, top-cited articles could be predicted quite accurately from their early tweeting frequency (Eysenbach 2011). In a separate study of ~4600 scientific articles published in the preprint database  arXiv.org, Shuai et al. (2012) found that papers with more mentions on Twitter were also associated with more downloads and early citations of papers, although the causality of these relationships is unclear (Shuai et al. 2012).