In case you’ve been wondering why I’ve been tweeting so much about our recent Nature article: Yes, I am really this proud and need to tell the whole world about it! :-)

Of course there are more other good reasons to discuss articles on Twitter, to do it yourself, and to publish in journals that also tweet about articles.

But let’s start with a disclaimer: Even though it’s the measure most commonly used to capture the impact of an article, and the one that is used below, too, citations of course don’t actually tell us anything about the quality of an article, nor about its importance for bringing the field forward. And none of the articles referred to below look at mechanisms — correlation doesn’t imply causation! With that out of the way, let’s look at the impact of tweeting about an article on that article’s citations.

More tweets about an article mean more citations

In their 2016 article, Peoples et al. looked at Twitter and how it relates to citation rates in ecological research. Of course, the strongest predictor of the number of times an article is cited is time after publication: the older the article, the more time it has had to accumulate citations. However, Peoples et al. (2016) found a strong relationship between the number of unique tweets, i.e. Twitter activity, about an article and the number of citations that article received. It’s thus beneficial for authors to tweet about articles — it brings the article to a larger audience’s attention, and knowing of an article is the requirement for it being read and potentially cited.

Peoples et al. (2016) also found that how much twitter activity an article received was not related to the journal’s impact factor. Articles in journals with lower impact factors can be just as heavily tweeted, and cited, as articles in higher impact factor journals. And in fact, they found that twitter activity related to an article was a better predictor of how much articles were going to be cited than 5-year journal impact factor of the journal they were published in!

If you don’t tweet about an article, nobody will

Actually, that’s completely overstating what the literature says. But it brings across a point I’m always trying to make: It’s in your own hands to promote yourself and your science.

In their 2016 study, Ortega found that articles authored by Twitter users are tweeted about 33% more than articles that were authored by non-Twitter users. Which makes sense to me: Even though I occasionally tweet about articles someone else has published, I tweet about pretty much everything that I publish myself.

Interestingly, once someone — anyone — tweets about an article, citation numbers don’t depend on whether the authors tweeted about it themselves, or whether someone else did for an author that isn’t a Twitter user. But again, if you tweet yourself, it’s in your hands and you don’t have to rely on anyone else to disseminate your research output, making it more likely that it will be seen and cited.

Journals that are on Twitter get tweeted about, and cited, more than those that aren’t

A 2017 study by Ortega investigates the relationship between the presence of academic journals on Twitter and how much articles in those journals get cited. Turns out that journals that have their own Twitter accounts are tweeted about about twice as much as journals without a Twitter account. Also, journals with twitter accounts do get 3 times more citations  than those without.

So even if you don’t want to tweet yourself, even just picking a journal that is active on Twitter is helping to make your article more visible to more people. Obviously this shouldn’t be the deciding factor for where to publish…

It even benefits the journal to be on Twitter

In a study on the use of Twitter by radiology journals by Kelly et al. (2016), it was shown that journals with Twitter profiles had a higher impact factor than those without a Twitter profile. There is, of course, the hen and egg problem here. But the study also found that 7 of 11 journals experienced increases in impact factor after joining Twitter, and that a greater number of followers on Twitter correlated with higher journal impact factor.

Btw, if you want to see an example of a journal’s Twitter done really well, check out Frontiers for Young Minds Twitter @FrontYoungMinds!

My 2 cents on tweeting about publications

I hear all the time that people (usually those neither actively nor passively involved with Twitter) feel like tweeting about articles is somehow a repulsive way of selling something that should be recognized for its scientific value alone, not for how much publicity the authors or someone else is generating for it. And while I kinda see the point — I agree that articles should be cited based on their scientific value, not their authors’ Twitter skills — I kinda don’t see it. In this day and age, there is so much research published every single day that it’s not a realistic expectation to be fully aware of everything being published that might be relevant to ones own research and interests. So assuming that not everybody for whom my articles might be relevant will be see it, I feel that it’s a service to the community to help them come across my work, that I of course believe is interesting, relevant, and sound. If I can let people know that I’ve published something that is worth reading, and I can even give them a brief idea what it’s about, either in a tweet or a thread, I am making it easier for people to find what they might have been looking for (or even what they would have been looking for had they known there was something like this out there to look for). And if they are not at all interested, I wonder how much of a different scrolling past my 280 characters will make? Surely not enough for them to cite something irrelevant.

Anyway, my take-away from all the research I’ve summarized above:

• Tweet about your publications, and repeatedly!
• Make your co-authors, your journal, your network tweet about articles!
• But also: Tweet about / retweet other people’s relevant articles to make that information visible to your own network!

Bibliography

Eysenbach G. (2011). Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact, J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e123, DOI: 10.2196/jmir.2012

Kelly, B.S., Redmond, C.E., Nason, G.J., Healy, G.M., Horgan, N.A., Heffernan, E.J. (2016). “The Use of Twitter by Radiology Journals: An Analysis of Twitter Activity and Impact Factor”, Journal of the American College of Radiology, Volume 13, Issue 11, Pages 1391-1396, ISSN 1546-1440,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacr.2016.06.041.

Ortega, J.L. (2016) To be or not to be on Twitter, and its relationship with the tweeting and citation of research papers. Scientometrics 109, 1353–1364. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2113-0

Ortega, J. (2017), “The presence of academic journals on Twitter and its relationship with dissemination (tweets) and research impact (citations)”, Aslib Journal of Information Management, Vol. 69 No. 6, pp. 674-687. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-02-2017-0055

Peoples, B. K., Midway, S. R., Sackett, D., Lynch, A., & Cooney, P. B. (2016). Twitter Predicts Citation Rates of Ecological Research. PloS one, 11(11), e0166570. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0166570

As my Twitter @meermini was quickly approaching 1k followers last week, I’ve been reflecting about who is following me and why. And on whether what I assume about my audience is influencing my tweeting behaviour. And I remembered an article I had read a while back by Coté and Darling (2018):

“Scientists on Twitter: Preaching to the choir or singing from the rooftops?”.

The question being discussed in the article is whether Twitter mainly serves scientists for inreach (“preaching to the choir”) or outreach (“singing from the rooftops”). Turns out that this typically depends on the number of followers an account has. There is a point at around 1k followers when scientists’ accounts typically start reaching audiences beyond other scientists and are therefore starting to be more useful as an outreach tool (outreach being defined in the article as reaching an audience of mainly non-scientists).

This doesn’t seem too surprising: Most scientists, when they start out on twitter, first follow people they know personally. Those are likely mostly scientists from within, or close to, their own speciality. But as the network grows, at some point the pool of those is “used up” and the network has to eventually expand to people who aren’t so close to that speciality any more, or even within science. I have certainly observed this for my account at just below 1k followers, probably enhanced by starting a non-academic job about a year ago that opened up a whole new world (and network) on and off Twitter.

Did the number of followers influence your tweeting behaviour, and if so, how?

I started out tweeting in the microblogging sense that I wanted my parents to be able to see pictures of my life in Norway without me having to email them. At that time I didn’t have any followers, nor did I follow anyone, so I would tend to not count this as actually “using Twitter”. But my handle @meermini still stems from that time. Nowadays I would probably choose something else for professional use… ;-)

After a little while, I began to realize the potential of using Twitter professionally, and I started following more people and reading more on Twitter. I was still mainly a passive user. I remained passive for several years, only at some point starting to have my blog automatically tweet the title and link to new blog posts as they were published. But for the longest time, I didn’t even bother to modify the tweet and really just tweeted out the title & link. This is not the best communication strategy, obviously, but it did help build an audience slowly and steadily, mainly of people who were really interested in my blog and thus my core topics.

As more and more people became interested in my kitchen oceanography stuff, I eventually started modifying the automated tweets to contain more than just the title of the blog posts, and I started thinking about what images to use as featured images on my blog, since they would be tweeted with the link & title. But I would only do it when I had time and mental space for that. I still put a lot more effort into the blog posts themselves than on advertising them on Twitter.

These days I am aware of how many people potentially see my tweets (but there are those rare times when it doesn’t register at all, too). I use the automated tweets that post with scheduled blogposts, as well as Twitter in general, a lot more purposefully now. I now pretty much always modify the automated tweets to include more information than just the blog post’s title. I also try to always include a picture in tweets. Either there is one in the blog post already that I think works well, or if there isn’t, I go find one. Sometimes I include hashtags in those pictures to make it easy to see at first glance what the post is about. I schedule blog posts (and thus the automated tweets) for specific days, so I can use meaningful hashtags on Twitter, like #SciCommSunday (that I am using for this post, btw) or #WaveWatchingWednesday or #FlumeFriday, and thus reach specific audiences.

I also try to put topics of my blog posts into context for people who aren’t in my own little #KitchenOceanography and #WaveWatching bubble. By, again, using hashtags, but also by just writing more generally about what the blog post I am linking to is about. And also when tweeting without it being automated tweets from my blog, I am definitely thinking about whether people will be able to put this into context if they aren’t exactly in my field.

So for me, things have definitely changed as I got more followers, but also as I recognized more how powerful Twitter is in terms of creating — or finding — conversations around topics I care about.

What would you recommend for when you are starting out Twitter? Do it your way or start out with a strategy?

Obviously, it depends on your goal. If you want to reach a large and non-scientists audience fast, you should probably think about a strategy and put efforts into writing nice tweets that match what your target audience would be interested in and how they would like that information presented.

But if you are just dipping your toes into Twitter, I don’t think there is anything wrong with doing what I did, and just feeling your way into it. Yes, your audience won’t grow as quickly, but maybe that means that it’s growing at a rate you are comfortable with. And if it’s too much of a hassle to tweet — just take a break, the world won’t end and neither will your career. And I am a strong proponent of the “you can only know what you are potentially missing out on for networks that you are a part of”: Even if you don’t want to spend a lot of time on Twitter, even checking in or tweeting once every couple of months is better than not doing anything at all. And who knows, you might realize that it is of more benefit to you than you thought it could be, and start spending more time and effort there. Or not. Only one way to find out!

For me, having those automated Tweets from my blog was a great way to recognize how many people were really interested in my topics, and as I recognized their interest, realizing that I wanted to present that information in a nicer, more appealing way. And I am grateful to have this platform for my topics now: Both within the ocean community, and then also — noticeably! — more and more beyond it!

Often completely underrated by people who start using twitter: The power of hashtags.

In this post: Very brief intro and then the three main purposes for which I personally use hashtags.

Hashtags: make your tweets easily findable

Marking a keyword in a tweet with the #-sign turns it into a link which, if clicked, takes you to a list of all other occurrences of this keyword marked by the #-sign, too. Hashtags are therefore a great way to make sure your tweets are seen by the relevant audience, or to make sure you see everything anyone else ever tweeted and marked with a specific hashtag.

Hashtags can be very broad (for example #science) or they can be very specific (like my favourite hashtag, #KitchenOceanography). And there is a whole spectrum in between those two extremes. Going from broad to more specific, one could use hashtags like #OceanScience, #Oceanography, #PhysicalOceanography, #OceanographyLab. Each of those is targeting a smaller audience, but one that is probably more specifically interested in what you are sharing (if you are writing about kitchen oceanography). Which hashtags to use therefore depends really on who you want to reach with a tweet: a larger, broad audience or a smaller, more focussed one.

I personally use hashtags for three main purposes:

Finding & building my community using hashtags

#CTDAppreciationDay, on January 22nd, is an amazing example of how social media can bring a community together around a common passion, in this case an oceanographic instrument.

This year’s #CTDAppreciationDay was the 5th annual event of its kind. From what I understand, it was started out of a combination of frustration and boredom at sea (but I might be completely off here. The first mention that I can find and that I am basing my interpretation on is this one here). But no matter why it was started, it definitely caught on: Oceanographers of all disciplines use the instrument, and clearly many people appreciate it a lot. So on this year’s #CTDappreciationday, about 200 tweets used that hashtag on Twitter. Nearly all of those tweets were either reminiscing of a particularly noteworthy moment at sea working with the instrument, a pretty sunset or rough weather, or were showing the many different applications of the instrument.

While those tweets are definitely enjoyable, for me, using this specific hashtag more is about finding “my people” than the content of the tweets themselves. Just following the hashtag #CTDAppreciationDay, I found about 40 new people to follow on that one day. All those people share my passion for fieldwork and appreciation of CTDs, and tweet about stuff related to the oceanography. I also gained 22 new followers that same day plus 19 more over the next two days (can’t be completely sure they all found me via that hashtag, but many of them followed me back after I followed them). As I don’t go to conferences any more, twitter is my main way of meeting new oceanographers, and this hashtag worked super well!

Which hashtag could you use to find “your people” — people that you don’t know exist yet but that share your passions?

Finding relevant tweets to a topic using hashtags

I love lab experiments. #FlumeFriday is a hashtag used on Fridays to mark posts that show some kind of experiment in a flume (a channel filled with water; in oceanography labs typically used to generate waves in or to have a stretch of controlled flow; both often combined with experiments on sediment transport, coastal protection, flows under different conditions). So in short: #FlumeFriday is super exciting for me! And it’s a hashtag that I both follow (because it’s so cool! Also I am always looking to learn more about tank experiments, what people work on in that area, what techniques they use, what their experiences are, …) and actively use (because I know that people following that hashtag are interested in tank experiments, even though mine are usually a lot more small-scale than most other people’s).

Another example of hashtags I follow are conference hashtags, whether I am there or not. For example #OSM20, the hashtag of the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2020,y is one that I will definitely follow since I wish I could be there!

Are there topics for which you would like to be notified each time someone tweets about them? What hashtags would people use for those topics?

Curating a collection of tweets using hashtags

There are two hashtags that I use with my work all the time: #KitchenOceanography (which was actually first used by my friend Geli at a time when I really didn’t know how to use Twitter well) and #FriendlyWaves. Both are super specific. #KitchenOceanography is about the oceanography-related experiments that you can do using only household items (check out posts about that here). #FriendlyWaves are posts in which I explain pictures of waves that my friends sent me.

Over the last months, pretty much all uses of those two hashtags were somehow related to me and my work. Which is really awesome: People who now look at those hashtags because they are curious what exactly is hidden behind those two terms find two projects that I am really passionate about, and also see that I am dominating those hashtags. So in a really positive way, I use those hashtags to “mark my territory”. And if someone else should start using them more frequently, I know there is a great new friendship in the making!

What hashtag is so super specific to your interests and work that you can make it your own, make it part of “your brand”?