The Effect of Social Media Promotion on Academic Article Uptake

Important emerging measures of academic impact are article download and citation rates. Yet little is known about the influences on these and ways in which academics might manage this approach to dissemination. Three groups of papers by academics in a center for speech-language-science (available through a university repository) were compared. The first group of target papers were blogged, and the blogs were systematically tweeted. The second group of connected control papers were nonblogged papers that we carefully matched for author, topic, and year of publication. The third group were papers by different staff members on a variety of topics—Unrelated Control Papers. The results suggest an effect of social media on download rate, which was limited not just to Target Papers but also generalized to Connected Control Papers. Unrelated Control Papers showed no increase over the same amount of time (main effect of time, F(1,27) = 55.6, p < .001); Significant Group×Time Interaction, F(2,27) = 7.9, p = .002). The effect on citation rates was less clear but followed the same trend. The only predictor of the 2015 citation rate was downloads after blogging (r = 0.450, p = .012). These preliminary results suggest that promotion of academic articles via social media may enhance download and citation rate and that this has implications for impact strategies