Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Can Twitter increase the visibility of Chinese publications?

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether diffusion through social media can help to improve the international visibility of Chinese papers and thus increase their citation impact. After analysing 160,233 Chinese papers published in 2012, as well as the number of tweets and citations received, the results indicate that tweeted Chinese papers published in the same year and journal received around 15% more citations than Chinese papers not mentioned on Twitter. The citation advantage of tweeted Chinese papers is also found within various disciplines and by the different citing countries.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. In this study, China refers to Mainland China, which is the area under the direct jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China (PRC) but excluding Hong Kong and Macau.

  2. People can occasionally access Twitter by using a virtual private network (VPN), but it is illegal in China.

  3. Publication counts presented in this paper were based on the number of articles, notes, and review articles found, but exclude Editorials, book reviews, letters to the editor and meeting abstracts that are not generally considered original contributions to scholarly knowledge.

  4. There is a possible issue pertaining to the accuracy of the data regarding the source countries of Twitter users, in that user can select any countries for their profile.

References

  • Alperin, J. P. (2014). South America: Citation databases omit local journals. Nature, 511(7508), 155.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alperin, J. P. (2015). The public impact of Latin America’s approach to open access. Doctoral dissertation. https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:jr256tk1194/AlperinDissertationFinalPublicImpact-augmented.pdf.

  • Andersen, J. P., & Haustein, S. (2015). Bootstrapping to evaluate accuracy of citation-based journal indicators. In The 15th international conference on scientometrics and informetrics, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015. ISSI.

  • Bornmann, L., & Leydesdorff, L. (2013). The validation of (advanced) bibliometric indicators through peer assessments: A comparative study using data from InCites and F1000. Journal of Informetrics, 7(2), 286–291. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2012.12.003.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Costas, R., Zahedi, Z., & Wouters, P. (2015a). Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(10), 2003–2019. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23309.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Costas, R., Zahedi, Z., & Wouters, P. (2015b). The thematic orientation of publications mentioned on social media: Large-scale disciplinary comparison of social media metrics with citations. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 67(3), 260–288. https://doi.org/10.1108/Ajim-12-2014-0173.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cress, P. E. (2014). Using altmetrics and social media to supplement impact factor: Maximizing your article’s academic and societal impact. Aesthetic Surgery Journal, 34(7), 1123–1126.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • de Winter, J. C. F. (2015). The relationship between tweets, citations, and article views for PLOS ONE articles. Scientometrics, 102(2), 1773–1779.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ding, Z., Zheng, X., & Wu, X. (2012). Strategies for expanding the international influences of academic journals: An example from Chinese pharmaceutical journals. Serials Review, 38(2), 80–85.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Eysenbach, G. (2011). Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on Twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. Journal of Medical Internet Research. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fausto, S., Machado, F. A., Bento, L. F. J., Iamarino, A., Nahas, T. R., & Munger, D. S. (2012). Research blogging: Indexing and registering the change in science 2.0. PLoS ONE, 7(12), e50109. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050109.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fu, H., & Ho, Y. (2013). Comparison of independent research of China’s top universities using bibliometric indicators. Scientometrics, 96(1), 259–276. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0912-5.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haustein, S., Costas, R., & Larivière, V. (2015). Characterizing social media metrics of scholarly papers: The effect of document properties and collaboration patterns. PLoS ONE, 10(3), e0120495.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haustein, S., Larivière, V., Thelwall, M., Amyot, D., & Peters, I. (2014). Tweets vs. Mendeley readers: How do these two social media metrics differ? IT-Information Technology, 56(5), 207–215.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hennemann, S., Wang, T., & Liefner, I. (2011). Measuring regional science networks in China: A comparison of international and domestic bibliographic data sources. Scientometrics, 88(2), 535–554.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ISTIC. (2010). Statistical data of Chinese S&T papers 2010. Beijing: ISTIC.

    Google Scholar 

  • ISTIC. (2017). Statistical data of Chinese S&T papers 2017. Beijing: ISTIC.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leydesdorff, L., & Zhou, P. (2005). Are the contributions of China and Korea upsetting the world system of science? Scientometrics, 63(3), 617–630.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li, X., Thelwall, M., & Giustini, D. (2012). Validating online reference managers for scholarly impact measurement. Scientometrics, 91(2), 461–471.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liang, L. (2003). Evaluating China’s research performance: How do SCI and Chinese indexes compare? Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 28(1), 38–43.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maleki, A. (2014). Twitter users in science tweets linking to articles: The case of web of science articles with Iranian authors. In 2014: American Society for Information Science and Technology, presented at SIG/MET post conference workshop, Seattle, USA.

  • Merton, R. K. (1968). The Matthew effect in science: The reward and communication systems of science are considered. Science, 159(3810), 56–63.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moed, H. (2002). Measuring China’s research performance using the Science Citation Index. Scientometrics, 53(3), 281–296.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Niu, F., & Qiu, J. (2014). Network structure, distribution and the growth of Chinese international research collaboration. Scientometrics, 98(2), 1221–1233.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Priem, J. (2014). Altmetrics. In B. Cronin & C. R. Sugimoto (Eds.), Beyond bibliometrics: Harnessing multidimensional indicators of performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Priem, J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P., & Neylon, C. (2010). Altmetrics: A manifesto. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/. Accessed 14 March 2017.

  • Qiu, J. P., Yang, R., & Zhao, R. (2010). Competition and excellence: Ranking of world-class universities 2009 and advance of Chinese universities. Journal of Library and Information Studies, 8(2), 11–27.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ren, S., & Liang, P. (1999). The challenge for Chinese scientific journals. Science, 286(5445), 1683.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ren, S., & Rousseau, R. (2002). International visibility of Chinese scientific journals. Scientometrics, 53(3), 389–405.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Robinson-Garcia, N., Torres-Salinas, D., Zahedi, Z., & Costas, R. (2014). New data, new possibilities: Exploring the insides of Altmetric.com. El Profesional de la información, 23(4), 359–366.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shu, F., & Haustein, S. (2017). On the citation advantage of tweeted papers at the journal level. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 54(1), 366–372. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2017.14505401040.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shu, F., & Lariviere, V. (2015). Chinese-language articles are biased in citations. Journal of Informetrics, 9(3), 526–528. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2015.05.005.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shuai, X., Pepe, A., & Bollen, J. (2012). How the scientific community reacts to newly submitted preprints: Article downloads, twitter mentions, and citations. PLoS ONE, 7(11), e47523. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047523.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thelwall, M. (2013). Assessing non-standard article impact using F1000 labels. Scientometrics, 97(2), 383–395.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thelwall, M. (2016). The precision of the arithmetic mean, geometric mean and percentiles for citation data: An experimental simulation modelling approach. Journal of Informetrics, 10(1), 110–123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2015.12.001.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thelwall, M., Haustein, S., Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2013a). Do altmetrics work? Twitter and ten other social web services. PLoS ONE, 8(5), e64841.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thelwall, M., Tsou, A., Weingart, S., Holmberg, K., & Haustein, S. (2013b). Tweeting links to academic articles. Cybermetrics: International Journal of Scientometrics, Informetrics and Bibliometrics, 17(1), 1–8.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vainio, J., & Holmberg, K. (2017). Highly tweeted science articles: Who tweets them? An analysis of Twitter user profile descriptions. Scientometrics, 112(1), 345–366. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2368-0.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Waltman, L., Calero-Medina, C., Kosten, J., Noyons, E. C. M., Tijssen, R. J. W., van Eck, N. J., et al. (2012). The Leiden ranking 2011/2012: Data collection, indicators, and interpretation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(12), 2419–2432. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22708.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, S., Wang, H., & Weldon, P. (2007). Bibliometric analysis of English-language academic journals of China and their internationalization. Scientometrics, 73(3), 331–343.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, S., & Weldon, P. R. (2006). Chinese academic journals: Quality, issues and solutions. Learned publishing: Journal of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, 19(2), 97–106.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, W., Wu, Y., & Pan, Y. (2014). An investigation of collaborations between top Chinese universities: A new quantitative approach. Scientometrics, 98(2), 1535–1545.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wu, Y., Pan, Y., Zhang, Y., Ma, Z., Pang, J., Guo, H., et al. (2004). China scientific and technical papers and citations (CSTPC): History, impact and outlook. Scientometrics, 60(3), 385–397.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhou, P., & Glänzel, W. (2010). In-depth analysis on Chinas international cooperation in science. Scientometrics, 82(3), 597–612.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhou, P., & Leydesdorff, L. (2007). A comparison between the China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database and the Science Citation Index in terms of journal hierarchies and interjournal citation relations. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(2), 223–236.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhu, J., Hassan, S.-U., Mirza, H. T., & Xie, Q. (2014). Measuring recent research performance for Chinese universities using bibliometric methods (English). Scientometrics, 101(1), 429–443.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This paper is an extended version of the paper presented at the ISSI2017 Conference. This study is supported by iFellows Doctoral Scholarship (11400674) provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Doctoral Research Scholarship (199349) provided by the Fonds de recherche société et culture Québec (FRQSC).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Fei Shu

  2. Department of Information Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Wen Lou

  3. School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

    Stefanie Haustein

Authors
  1. Fei Shu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Wen Lou
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Stefanie Haustein
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fei Shu.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Shu, F., Lou, W. & Haustein, S. Can Twitter increase the visibility of Chinese publications?. Scientometrics 116, 505–519 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2732-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2732-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation