The DOI matches its Crossref record; 42 of the 48 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services
Open accessAbstract
Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have reported medium correlations between specific altmetrics and citation rates for individual journals or fields. To fill this gap, this study compares 11 altmetrics with Web of Science citations for 76 to 208,739 PubMed articles with at least one altmetric mention in each case and up to 1,891 journals per metric. It also introduces a simple sign test to overcome biases caused by different citation and usage windows. Statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and higher citations for articles with positive altmetric scores in all cases with sufficient evidence (Twitter, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blogs, mainstream media and forums) except perhaps for Google+ posts. Evidence was insufficient for LinkedIn, Pinterest, question and answer sites, and Reddit, and no conclusions should be drawn about articles with zero altmetric scores or the strength of any correlation between altmetrics and citations. Nevertheless, comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles. Finally, the coverage of all the altmetrics except for Twitter seems to be low and so it is not clear if they are prevalent enough to be useful in practice.
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“A 12-month timeframe was deemed appropriate to provide an accurate indication of Altmetric attention score and citations considering there appears to be a quick uptake of attention-based indicators after publication (Thelwall et al., 2013), and that short-term citation counts are highly correlated with long-term citation counts in peer-reviewed research (Liu et al., 2015).”
From Graphical abstracts are associated with greater Altmetric attention scores, but not citations, in sport science (2023) · cites this paper as Thelwall et al., 2013
In the citing paper
“The WoS and Scopus platforms also provide researchers with usage counts for publications, enabling researchers to analyze the usage data and to explore usage patterns (Wang et al., 2016, Thelwall et al., 2013).”
From Core Elements in the Process of Citing Publications: Conceptual Overview of the Literature (2018) · cites this paper as Thelwall et al., 2013
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Citations
Cites
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Lachenbruch, P. A., & Cohen, J. (1989) · Journal of the American Statistical Association · doi:10.2307/2290095 · Cited by 37,421
Eysenbach, G. (2011) · Journal of Medical Internet Research · doi:10.2196/jmir.2012 · Cited by 1,088
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What is societal impact of research and how can it be assessed? a literature survey
Bornmann, L. (2012) · Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/asi.22803 · Cited by 732
Earlier Web usage statistics as predictors of later citation impact
Brody, T., Harnad, S. R., & Carr, L. A. (2006) · Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/asi.20373 · Cited by 403
Scientometrics 2.0: New metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web
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Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impactPreprint
Priem, J. R., Piwowar, H., & Hemminger, B. M. (2012) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1203.4745 · Cited by 360
Shuai, X., Pepe, A., & Bollen, J. (2012) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0047523 · Cited by 327
The weakening relationship between the impact factor and papers' citations in the digital age
Lozano, G. A., Larivière, V., & Gingras, Y. (2012) · Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/asi.22731 · Cited by 293
Self-citation
Research works printed but not linked: 2
- Haustein S (2012) Readership metrics. In: Cronin B, Sugimoto C, editors. Beyond Bibliometrics: Harnessing Multi-dimensional Indicators of Performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, in press.
- Bar-Ilan J (2012a) JASIST@mendeley. Presented at the ACM Web Science Conference Workshop on Altmetrics Evanston, IL. Available: http://altmetricsorg/altmetrics12/bar-ilan. Accessed 21 January 2013.
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Thangavel, V. (2026) · Librarium. · doi:10.53088/librarium.v3i2.3578
Maurya, A. (2026) · Advances in computational intelligence and robotics book series · doi:10.4018/979-8-3373-7262-4.ch003
Simo, G. M., Rizzo, A., Muy, K. B., Quintanilla, N., & Scotland, K. B. (2026) · medRxiv · doi:10.64898/2026.09.01.26361260
Tsyganok, V., Khrollenko, Y., Domanetska, I., Tsyhanok, O., & TRUBITSYNA, O. (2025) · doi:10.55056/ceur-ws.org/vol-4068/paper14
Naik, R. L., & Naik, U. (2026) · The International Information & Library Review · doi:10.1080/10572317.2026.2731968
Altmetrics and Other Alternative Indicators
Thelwall, M. A. (2026) · White Rose University Press eBooks · doi:10.22599/quantitativemethods.k
Self-citationOkamura, K., & Koshiba, H. (2021) · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · doi:10.5281/zenodo.5803961
Smailhodzic, A. (2015) · TopSCHOLAR (Western Kentucky University)
Metadata
- Authors
- Thelwall, M., Haustein, S., Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R.
- Affiliations
- University of Wolverhampton (GB)
- Science-Metrix (Canada) (CA)
- Université du Québec à Montréal (CA)
- Indiana University Bloomington (US)
- Corresponding author
- Thelwall, Mike
- Venue
- PLoS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2013-05-28
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- e64841
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3665624
- OpenAlex
- W2073023209
- Cited by
- 907
- References
- 48
- Citations by year
- 2026: 29 · 2025: 36 · 2024: 48 · 2023: 42 · 2022: 61 · 2021: 82 · 2020: 89 · 2019: 75 · 2018: 103 · 2017: 101 · 2016: 73 · 2015: 85 · 2014: 68 · 2013: 15
- FWCI
- 88.64
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Papyrus : Institutional Repository (Université de Montréal) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1208804)
- Joint Information Systems Committee
- Arts and Humanities Research Council
- Economic and Social Research Council
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web visibility and informetrics
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Keywords
- altmetrics, Twitter, social web services, article impact, citation analysis, PubMed articles, sign test, research highlights, mainstream media coverage
- MeSH terms
- Humans, Publishing, Bibliometrics, PubMed, Social Media
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