Who Cares About Tweeting? The Impact of Social Media on the Future of Scientific Research

Social media has become explosively influential in our daily lives, and it has become increasingly important in scientific research. In this age of social media-driven interaction, researchers are constantly looking for ways to promote and spread their research. It is interesting to see how social media actually impacts research and Altmetric provides a way to understand this, especially in comparison to more traditional metrics. With the Altmetric data, we are able to track more modern indicators of engagement. We decided to look into the specific question of: Does the number of tweets about a research paper actually impact the number of readers on Mendeley? We used the diabetes dataset provided by Altmetric and looked into the correlation between the number of tweets and readers for each research paper. We also looked into the correlation for different subgroups of tweeters. We concluded that there was no linear correlation, and because the number of tweets does not strongly impact the number of reads, we cannot predict an increase in reads if an article is actively tweeted about. According to our analysis, there is no straightforward way of determining whether increased tweeting will have a strong positive contribution to number of downloads.