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Feb. 12, 2021 , 11:20 AM
Seeking to spread the word about a hot new study, some scientists take to Twitter to share a link. But Twitter links rarely attract eyeballs to papers, a recent study finds.
A review of 1.1 million Twitter links to scholarly articles found that half drew no clicks, and an additional 22% attracted just one or two. Only about 10% of the links received more than 10 clicks, according to the 23 January study in the
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
Such meager click rates are not unusual, other studies of Twitter have found. Tweets highlighting stories in media outlets don’t fare much better, on average. But although most research papers included in the new study prompted no clicks, a small minority went viral: An article about freshwater fish contaminated by radioactive cesium released by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster received more than 25,000.