IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pbs/ecofin/2023-09.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do Social Media Science Stars Get Citation Premium?

Author

Listed:
  • Christian Lessmann

    (Dresden University of Technology)

  • Ali Sina Önder

    (University of Portsmouth)

Abstract

We analyze whether the social media popularity of scientists affects the number of academic citations. We use the COVID-19 global pandemic as a quasi-natural experiment exogenously increasing public attention and the demand for expertise. Using social media stars’ and their coauthors’ publications on COVID-related topics prior to the break out of the pandemic, we find that the social media star status added 1.10 citations following the breakout of COVID-19 per year per article, corresponding to 80% of the pre-COVID citation gap between stars and their coauthors. We find no significant treatment effect based on scientists’ Kardashian indexes.

Suggested Citation

  • Christian Lessmann & Ali Sina Önder, 2023. "Do Social Media Science Stars Get Citation Premium?," Working Papers in Economics & Finance 2023-09, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth Business School, Economics and Finance Subject Group.
    • Handle: RePEc:pbs:ecofin:2023-09
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://repec.port.ac.uk/EconFinance/PBSEconFin_2023_09.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. P Sage Anderson & Aubrey R Odom & Hunter M Gray & Jordan B Jones & William F Christensen & Todd Hollingshead & Joseph G Hadfield & Alyssa Evans-Pickett & Megan Frost & Christopher Wilson & Lance E Dav, 2020. "A case study exploring associations between popular media attention of scientific research and scientific citations," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(7), pages 1-15, July.
    2. Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Sam Work & Vincent Larivière & Stefanie Haustein, 2017. "Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 68(9), pages 2037-2062, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Yaxue Ma & Zhichao Ba & Yuxiang Zhao & Jin Mao & Gang Li, 2021. "Understanding and predicting the dissemination of scientific papers on social media: a two-step simultaneous equation modeling–artificial neural network approach," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(8), pages 7051-7085, August.
    2. Sergio Copiello, 2019. "Research Interest: another undisclosed (and redundant) algorithm by ResearchGate," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(1), pages 351-360, July.
    3. Chieh Liu & Mu-Hsuan Huang, 2022. "Exploring the relationships between altmetric counts and citations of papers in different academic fields based on co-occurrence analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(8), pages 4939-4958, August.
    4. Cindy Sing-Bik Ngai & Rita Gill Singh, 2020. "Relationship between persuasive metadiscoursal devices in research article abstracts and their attention on social media," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(4), pages 1-25, April.
    5. Wang, Zhiqi & Chen, Yue & Glänzel, Wolfgang, 2020. "Preprints as accelerator of scholarly communication: An empirical analysis in Mathematics," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    6. Qianjin Zong & Yafen Xie & Rongchan Tuo & Jingshi Huang & Yang Yang, 2019. "The impact of video abstract on citation counts: evidence from a retrospective cohort study of New Journal of Physics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(3), pages 1715-1727, June.
    7. Daniel Torres-Salinas & Nicolás Robinson-Garcia & Juan Gorraiz, 2017. "Filling the citation gap: measuring the multidimensional impact of the academic book at institutional level with PlumX," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(3), pages 1371-1384, December.
    8. Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado & Daniel Torres-Salinas & Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, 2021. "Identifying and characterizing social media communities: a socio-semantic network approach to altmetrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(11), pages 9267-9289, November.
    9. Siluo Yang & Xin Xing & Fan Qi & Maria Cláudia Cabrini Grácio, 2021. "Comparison of academic book impact from a disciplinary perspective: an analysis of citations and altmetric indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(2), pages 1101-1123, February.
    10. Lutz Bornmann & Robin Haunschild & Vanash M Patel, 2020. "Are papers addressing certain diseases perceived where these diseases are prevalent? The proposal to use Twitter data as social-spatial sensors," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(11), pages 1-22, November.
    11. Shahzad, Murtuza & Alhoori, Hamed & Freedman, Reva & Rahman, Shaikh Abdul, 2022. "Quantifying the online long-term interest in research," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2).
    12. Martín-Martín, Alberto & Orduna-Malea, Enrique & Delgado López-Cózar, Emilio, 2018. "Author-level metrics in the new academic profile platforms: The online behaviour of the Bibliometrics community," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(2), pages 494-509.
    13. Bornmann, Lutz & Haunschild, Robin & Adams, Jonathan, 2019. "Do altmetrics assess societal impact in a comparable way to case studies? An empirical test of the convergent validity of altmetrics based on data from the UK research excellence framework (REF)," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 325-340.
    14. Łukasz Wiechetek & Zbigniew Pastuszak, 2022. "Academic social networks metrics: an effective indicator for university performance?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(3), pages 1381-1401, March.
    15. Ting Cong & Zhichao Fang & Rodrigo Costas, 2022. "WeChat uptake of chinese scholarly journals: an analysis of CSSCI-indexed journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(12), pages 7091-7110, December.
    16. Wang, Yajie & Hou, Haiyan & Hu, Zhigang, 2021. "‘To tweet or not to tweet?’ A study of the use of Twitter by scholarly book publishers in Social Sciences and Humanities," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3).
    17. Li, Huixu & Liu, Lanjian & Wang, Xianwen, 2021. "The open access effect in social media exposure of scholarly articles: A matched-pair analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3).
    18. Nasirov, Shukhrat & Joshi, Amol M., 2023. "Minding the communications gap: How can universities signal the availability and value of their scientific knowledge to commercial organizations?," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(9).
    19. Siluo Yang & Xin Xing & Dietmar Wolfram, 2018. "Difference in the impact of open-access papers published by China and the USA," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(2), pages 1017-1037, May.
    20. David A. Pendlebury, 2019. "Charting a path between the simple and the false and the complex and unusable: Review of Henk F. Moed, Applied Evaluative Informetrics [in the series Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Scientifi," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(1), pages 549-560, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social Media; Expertise; Kardashian index; Citations; Covid;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pbs:ecofin:2023-09. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Shuonan Zhang (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/depbsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.