Correlation Between Twitter Mentions and Academic Citations in Sexual Medicine Journals ✉ Mehmet Serkan Ozkent1, Kadir Böcü2, Emre Altintas2 and Murat Gul 2

IJIR: Your Sexual Medicine Journal www.nature.com/ijir

ARTICLE Correlation between Twitter mentions and academic citations in sexual medicine journals ✉ Mehmet Serkan Ozkent1, Kadir Böcü2, Emre Altintas2 and Murat Gul 2

Social media services, especially Twitter, are used as a commonly sharing tool in the scientific world. This widespread use of Twitter would be an effective method in spreading academic publications. So, we aimed to investigate the relationship between Twitter mentions and traditional citations of articles in sexual medicine journals in this study. We reviewed the articles published in seven journals of sexual medicine (2 years after the publication of the articles) between January 2018 and June 2018. In the first half of 2018, 410 articles were extracted. Of these, 352 (85.9%) were original articles, while 58 (14.1%) were review articles. The median number of citations of the articles mentioned at least once on Twitter was 7 (interquartile range: 0–111) for Google Scholar, whereas it was 0 (interquartile range: 0–63) for Scopus, respectively. It was 4 (interquartile range: 0–25) for Google Scholar and 0 (interquartile range: 0–7) for Scopus. The publications mentioned on Twitter were cited more than the non-mentioned publications in the traditional-based citation system (p < 0.001). A significant relationship between the citation numbers and tweet numbers was also observed (p < 0.001). Also, in the linear regression model, the tweet numbers (p < 0.001) and article types (p < 0.001) were found to be related to the Google Scholar citation numbers. In conclusion, using Twitter as a professional tool in academic life would allow information to be propagated and responded quickly, especially for sexual medicine journals.

IJIR: Your Sexual Medicine Journal; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41443-021-00457-0

INTRODUCTION Many urologists have already adapted to this effect [10]. It is The ways people interact and communicate worldwide have shown that approximately one-third of the American Urological changed drastically with social media (SoMe) [1]. This change was Association (AUA) members have a Twitter account [10, 11]. This not only limited to social life but also appeared in the scientific widespread use of Twitter would be an effective method in world [2]. The scientific role of SoMe in healthcare represents a spreading academic publications, especially for sexual medicine significant area in medicine [3, 4]. journals. Scientific data sharing has accelerated with the increasing use Therefore, we aimed to investigate the relationship between of SoMe in the academic community. In this way, it has facilitated Twitter mentions and traditional citations of articles in sexual to reach of wider audiences [5]. The use of SoMe as a resource in medicine journals. evaluating the impact levels of scientific research increases due to its contribution to knowledge sharing [6]. In order to measure the scientific impact of SoMe, new metric evaluation systems have METHODS been recently introduced such as Altmetric and PlumX metric to We retrospectively reviewed articles published in ten sexual medicine determine the online attention from SoMe services such as journals based on Clarivate Analytics and Scimago Journal & Country Rank Facebook, Twitter, blogs, citations on Wikipedia and in public (cited in 2019). The impact factor (IF) of these Journals according to Journal ≥ – policy documents, discussions on research blogs, mainstream Citation Reports in 2019 was 1, and the Q index was Q1 Q3. Journals with IF < 1 IF and/or Q4 were excluded from the present study. Journal of Sexual media coverage, bookmarks on reference managers like Mende- Medicine (Q1, IF: 3.293), Andrology (Q1, IF: 2.860), Basic and Clinical ley, etc[7, 8].. Some publishers such as Elsevier, Nature Publishing Andrology (Q2, IF: 2.600), The World Journal of Men’s Health (Q3; IF:2.547), Group, Frontiers have begun to provide readers with alternative Asian Journal of Andrology (Q2, IF:2.448), Translational Andrology and measurement information using these different sources [9]. These Urology (Q2, IF: 2.445), Andrologia (Q2, IF:1.951), Sexual Medicine (Q3, IF: metrics systems provide qualitative data that are considered 1.923), Sexual Medicine Reviews (Q1, IF: 1.807), International Journal of complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics [9]. Impotence Research (IJIR) (Q3, IF: 1.388), were selected. Twitter is a microblogging service where text-based messages Of these, journals providing Altmetric or PlumX metric measurements are shared [10]. It has around 230 million users who post almost for their articles were included in the study. Altmetric and PlumX metrics 500 million tweets per day, and its usage increases day by day. are the Digital Science companies utilizing diverse resources such as academic platforms, citations, forums, web-based platforms, social media, This increase is observed not only in social content sharing but fi Wikipedia articles, etc., to ensure an alternative metric score to the also in scienti c content sharing. Many academicians share traditional citation system [12]. The sharing number on SoMe platforms, scientific articles here and enable them to reach more people. number of references, and frequency of clicks contribute to this metric

✉ 1Department of Urology, Konya City Hospital, Konya, Turkey. 2Department of Urology, Selcuk University, School of Medicine, Konya, Turkey. email: [email protected] Received: 23 January 2021 Revised: 21 June 2021 Accepted: 29 June 2021 M.S. Ozkent et al. 2 score algorithm. The higher quality sources provide greater weight, while the Altmetric and PlumX metric data of the articles, the number of Twitter exposure, less respectable or less known sources take up lower weight [13]. mentions, and the traditional citation numbers were recorded. The search Thus, an alternative metric attention score to the traditional citation is bars “https://www.altmetric.com/products/free-tools/bookmarklet/” and obtained. Based on obtained findings, these metric systems aim to “https://plumanalytics.com/learn/about-metrics/” were used to obtain evaluate the popularity of the research output [14]. Moreover, metric these data. scores obtained may be considered as an indicator of the scientific effect of published articles. Various companies use both two platforms for a similar purpose. Altmetric score is used by some publishers such Springer Statistical analyses Nature, John Wiley & Sons, Taylor and Francis on their publisher platforms Statistical Package for Social Sciences volume 22.0 (IBM Corp., IL, Chicago, [12, 14], while the PlumX metric is used by Elsevier products (Mendeley, USA) program was used to analyze the data. The independent t-test was used to compare parametric data, and Mann–Whitney U test was used to Scopus, etc.) [14]. compare non-parametric data. Spearman and Pearson correlation analyzes The number of tweets that articles took in some sexual medicine were used for correlation assessment. A linear regression analysis was journals was achieved by Altmetric, while that of in other journals was ’ attained via PlumX metric. The articles in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, conducted to examine the effect of the Twitter mentions numbers on the articles’ citation numbers. A confidence interval of 95% and a p of less than Sexual Medicine Reviews, and Sexual Medicine were evaluated by the fi PlumX metric. Besides, the Altmetric evaluation system was used for 0.05 were considered signi cant. articles in Andrology, Andrologia, IJIR, and Basic and Clinical Andrology journals. The Asian Journal of Andrology was excluded from the study because it does not provide any metric measure for Twitter mentions. RESULTS Translational Andrology and Urology and The World Journal of Men’s In the first half of 2018, 410 articles, original research articles, and Health were excluded from the study because they have publications on review articles were published in the sexual medicine journals general urology in addition to sexual medicine. Original articles and included in the present study. Out of these articles, 352 (85.9%) reviews were included for article selection criteria, while editorial were original researches and 58 (14.1%) review articles (Table 1). comments, case reports, expert opinions, conference summaries, and The descriptive analysis of these articles based on the included letters to editors were excluded. Besides, articles outside of the specified journals is shown in Table 2. time frame and non-English articles were also excluded. fi A total of seven sexual medicine journals were included in the study Three hundred ninety- ve (96.3%) of the articles were cited at before analysis. The past issues, from January 2018 to June 2018, were least once in Google Scholar. The median number of citations for checked through the journals’ web pages, and the article titles were articles published in this period was six citations (interquartile searched in Scopus and Google Scholar. The date range was considered range (IR): 0–111 cite). In the Scopus query, 32.2% of all these

1234567890();,: based on the publication dates (not online or early view) of the articles in articles (n = 132) were cited at least once (median 0; IR: 0–63). We the journal. The data were evaluated, on average, 2 years after the articles observed that 263 (64.1%) of all articles were tweeted at least were published. It was thought that this process would allow the impact of once. The median number of mentions on Twitter was one Tweet published articles fully observed. Two authors performed the search, and (IR: 0–2348 Tweet) (Fig. 1). The median citation number of articles on Google Scholar and Scopus but not mentioned on Twitter was 4 (IR: 0–25) and 0 (IR: Table 1. The number and type of published articles in selected 0–7), respectively. The median citation numbers of the articles journals. mentioned at least once on Twitter was 7 (IR: 0–111) for Google Scholar, whereas it was 0 (IR: 0–63) for Scopus, respectively. Journals’ name Original article Review Total (n) (%) (n) (%) (n) (%) Subgroup analysis of the articles showed that three journals were evaluated with the PlumX metric. The median citation J Sex Med 75 (91.5) 7 (8.5) 82 (20) numbers of these three journals were 8 for Google Scholar (IR: Sex Med Rev 0 33 (100) 33 (8.1) 0–111) and 5 for Scopus (IR: 0–63). The median number of Andrology 48 (82.8) 10 (17.2) 58 (14.1) Twitter mentions was 10 (IR: 0–2348), while the median numeric – Andrologia 191 (98.5) 3 (1.5) 194 (47.3) value in the PlumX metric was 41 (IR: 0 378). In this analysis, a signiﬁcant positive correlation was found between PlumX metric IJIR 18 (94.7) 1 (5.3) 19 (4.6) value, the number of Twitter mentions, and traditional citations Sex Med 16 (88.9) 2 (11.1) 18 (4.4) (p < 0.001). Basic Clin Androl 4 (66.7) 2 (33.3) 6 (1.5) The median citation numbers of the other four journals that – J Sex Med Journal of Sexual Medicine, Sex Med Rev Sexual Medicine Reviews, evaluated with Altmetric was 5 (IR: 0 46) for Google Scholar and 0 IJIR International Journal of Impotence Research, Sex Med Sexual Medicine, for Scopus (IR: 0–20). Again, the median number of mentions of Basic Clin Androl Basic and Clinical Andrology. these articles on Twitter was 0 (IR: 0–46), and the median numerical metric value in Altmetric was 1 (IR: 0–251). In this other

Table 2. Median number of citations, mentions on Twitter, and metric values of articles on journal basis. Journals’ name Number of Number of citations Number of mentions Metric value Metric value citations (GS) (Scopus) (Twitter) (PlumXmetrics) (Almetrics) J Sex Med 7 (0–111) 5 (0–63) 13.5 (0–2348) 53 (3–378) N/A Sex Med Rev 10 (1–41) 7 (1–35) 8 (0–69) 45 (7–192) N/A Andrology 6.5 (0–46) N/A 0.5 (0–28) N/A 1 (0–105) Andrologia 5 (0–32) N/A 0 (0–46) N/A 0 (0–251) IJIR 6 (0–12) N/A 7 (1–22) N/A 4 (2–16) Sex Med 6 (0–35) 3.5 (0–19) 5 (1–57) 3.5 (0–19) N/A Basic Clin Androl 6.5 (1–27) 4.5 (1–20) 1 (0–2) N/A 1 (0–2) J Sex Med Journal of Sexual Medicine, Sex Med Rev Sexual Medicine Reviews, IJIR International Journal of Impotence Research, Sex Med Sexual Medicine, Basic Clin Androl Basic and Clinical Andrology, N/A Not applicable, GS Google Scholar, JIF Journals’ Impact Factor. A number of citations and number of mentions has been stated median and interquartile range.

IJIR: Your Sexual Medicine Journal M.S. Ozkent et al. 3

Fig. 1 The association of Google Scholar citations and the tweet numbers. Big circle shows articles with and without citations. Most of the articles (n = 395) have one or more citations. The small circle represents the number of tweets about the cited articles. While 256 articles were tweeted one or more, 139 articles were not tweeted at all.

Fig. 2 The association between the number of tweets and Google Scholar and Scopus citations. The linear regression model demonstrates a positive corelation between tweet number and Google Scholar and Scopus citations. subgroup analysis, we showed a positive correlation between the DISCUSSION Altmetric value, the number of Twitter mentions, and the number Citation is accepted as an acknowledgment dedicated to the cited of traditional citations (p < 0.001). article in the scientific community [15]. Furthermore, the citation is Articles that had been tweeted at least once received more assumed to be an indicator for exploring different aspects, such as citations than those without (Mann–Whitney U: 12749.5, p < detecting the latest research trends, finding the study topics, 0.001). Besides, we found a significant relationship between the ranking corporations, and ranking the journals [16]. Until recently, number of citations and tweets in evaluated articles (p < 0.001). In an article’s scientific effect primarily has been measured by its the linear regression model, we observed that the number of citations [17]. The new metric systems such as Altmetric and tweets (p < 0.001) and the article type (p < 0.001) are the factors PlumX metric have been increasingly recognized to meter the related to the number of Google Scholar and Scopus citations (p < real-time reach and influence of an article [18]. Alternative metrics, 0.001, both) (Fig. 2). However, the journal type did not affect the Altmetric and PlumX metric included quantifying the digital citation rates (p: 0.282). attention that an article receives in diverse online sources [18, 19]. The first ten articles with the most citations (GS and Scopus) and The articles produced from these metrics showed a significant tweets are shown in Table 3. Besides, the review articles had more correlation with the number of traditional citations [20]. For this citations on both platforms (GS and Scopus) and more tweets than reason, Altmetric scores have been used frequently to evaluate the original articles (all of the p values < 0.001) (Table 4). article impact in recent years [21, 22].

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Table 3. A. The first 10 articles with the most citations on Google Scholar. B. The first 10 articles with the most citations on Scopus. C. The first 10 articles with the most tweets.

A. Articles’ name Citation number of GS The Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria Study (1972–2015): Trends in Prevalence, Treatment, and Regrets 111 British Society for Sexual Medicine Guidelines on the Management of Erectile Dysfunction in Men-2017 50 Congenital bilateral absence of the vas deferens is an atypical form of cystic ﬁbrosis: reproductive implications and genetic counseling 46 Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction: A Literature Review 41 Erythrocytosis Following Testosterone Therapy 38 Update on the Safety of Phosphodiesterase Type 5 Inhibitors for the Treatment of Erectile Dysfunction 38 Desire to Have Children Among Transgender People in Germany: A Cross-Sectional Multi-Center Study 37 Physical Activity to Improve Erectile Function: A Systematic Review of Intervention Studies 35 Genders and Individual Treatment Progress in (Non-)Binary Trans Individuals 32 Testosterone and Cardiovascular Risk: Meta-Analysis of Interventional Studies 32

B. Articles’ name Citation number of Scopus The Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria Study (1972–2015): Trends in Prevalence, Treatment, and Regrets 63 Erythrocytosis Following Testosterone Therapy 35 British Society for Sexual Medicine Guidelines on the Management of Erectile Dysfunction in Men-2017 32 Desire to Have Children Among Transgender People in Germany: A Cross-Sectional Multi-Center Study 29 Testosterone and Cardiovascular Risk: Meta-Analysis of Interventional Studies 25 Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction: A Literature Review 21 Update on the Safety of Phosphodiesterase Type 5 Inhibitors for the Treatment of Erectile Dysfunction 20 Genders and Individual Treatment Progress in (Non-)Binary Trans Individuals 20 Understanding the seminal plasma proteome and its role in male fertility 20 Physical Activity to Improve Erectile Function: A Systematic Review of Intervention Studies 19

C. Articles’ name Tweet number The Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria Study (1972–2015): Trends in Prevalence, Treatment, and Regrets 2348 Tibial Nerve Stimulation to Drive Genital Sexual Arousal in an Anesthetized Female Rat 208 Effect of Sexual Intercourse on Lower Extremity Muscle Force in Strength-Trained Men 119 British Society for Sexual Medicine Guidelines on the Management of Erectile Dysfunction in Men-2017 94 Declining Sexual Activity and Desire in Men-Findings From Representative German Surveys, 2005 and 2016 79 Expanding the Analysis of Psychosocial Factors of Sexual Desire in Men 73 Diet and Men’s Sexual Health 69 Gender Dysphoria and Gender Change in Disorders of Sex Development/Intersex Conditions: Results From the dsd-LIFE Study 62 How Hot Are They? Neural Correlates of Genital Arousal: An Infrared Thermographic and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of 62 Sexual Arousal in Men and Women Sexual Arousal and Sexually Explicit Media (SEM): Comparing Patterns of Sexual Arousal to SEM and Sexual Self-Evaluations and 57 Satisfaction Across Gender and Sexual Orientation GS Google Scholar.

programs are frequently used to create a collaborative environ- Table 4. The article’s citations’ number and Tweet’ number based on ment and to increase cooperation between employees in the fi article type. common area. Furthermore, it is also an effective vehicle in nding solutions to important social issues [29]. Original article Review article p Value Like in the general population, SoMe popularity manifested Number of Tweets 1 (0–2348) 7 (0–94) <0.001 itself among healthcare professionals as well. A survey among Number of Citations (GS) 5 (0–111) 10 (1–50) <0.001 Canadian urologists has revealed that 26% used SoMe routinely in Number of Citations 0(0–63) 5 (0–35) <0.001 their personal lives [24]. Another survey among AUA members (Scopus) revealed that 74% had a SoMe account but only 28% used these GS Google Scholar. in a professional setting [23]. Another study has shown that the 99% of young urologist in Europe uses social media both personally and professionally [30]. Moreover, SoMe is not only This trend raises the question of how SoMe usage affects limited to personal or professional use but also in scientific traditional metrics. Recently, some brands of SoMe, such as Twitter meetings. It is frequently used, especially during the urology and Facebook, have become a part of our daily life, and their conferences, for the increased interaction among participants [31]. popularity has increased steadily over the last years [23–25]. The Twitter metrics related to the meetings of some American majority of SoMe platforms are frequently used in the scientific societies reveal data on the number of users, tweets, and area for different purposes, including to provide information and interactions at their annual meetings [32, 33]. Similarly, the AUA to spread scientific work [26, 27]. Moreover, they have found a and the European Association of Urology have formally adopted place in medical education as well [28]. Besides, social network and promoted the use of year-specific meeting hashtags [23, 34].

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