Could early tweet counts predict later citation counts? A gender study in Life Sciences and Biomedicine (2014-2016).

In this study, it was investigated whether early tweets counts could differentially benefit female and male (first, last) authors in terms of the later citation counts received. The data for this study comprised 47,961 articles in the research area of Life Sciences & Biomedicine from 2014-2016, retrieved from Web of Science's Medline. For each article, the number of received citations per year was downloaded from WOS, while the number of received tweets per year was obtained from PlumX. Using the hurdle regression model, I compared the number of received citations by female and male (first, last) authored papers and then I investigated whether early tweet counts could predict the later citation counts received by female and male (first, last) authored papers. In the regression models, I controlled for several important factors that were investigated in previous research in relation to citation counts, gender or Altmetrics. These included journal impact (SNIP), number of authors, open access, research funding, topic of an article, international collaboration, lay summary, F1000 Score and mega journal. The findings showed that the percentage of papers with male authors in first or last authorship positions was higher than that for female authors. However, female first and last-authored papers had a small but significant citation advantage of 4.7% and 5.5% compared to male-authored papers. The findings also showed that irrespective of whether the factors were included in regression models or not, early tweet counts had a weak positive and significant association with the later citations counts (3.3%) and the probability of a paper being cited (21.1%). Regarding gender, the findings showed that when all variables were controlled, female (first, last) authored papers had a small citation advantage of 3.7% and 4.2% in comparison to the male authored papers for the same number of tweets.

Bibliometric mapping of microbiology research topics (2012-16): a comparison by socioeconomic development and infectious disease vulnerability values.

Amongst health-related scientific disciplines, microbiology appears to play a vital role in creating a sustainable future with respect to health, the environment and a biobased economy. Microbiology research covers a wide range of different disciplines and addresses many important global issues. This study aimed to identify topics being addressed within the last 5 years (2012-16) in the field of microbiology worldwide and to compare them in terms of three different indicators: gross domestic product, Human Development Index and Infectious Disease Vulnerability Index. The dataset of this study comprised 167 874 articles and reviews from 2012 to 2016, which were extracted from the Web of Science Medline. To identify and visualise the topics addressed during the studied period, VOSviewer was used. The construction and visualisation of the term map was done based on 5918 MESH subject headings. The methodology and procedures employed included Kruskal-Wallis test and two-sample proportion test. Overall, our study showed that the field of microbiology has focused on six different topics during 2012-16. The papers written with the collaboration of countries with low socioeconomic status and high vulnerability to infectious diseases mainly addressed topics related to the primary needs of people such as food safety, the prevention and control of infectious diseases, food and energy poverty. In contrast, papers written with the collaboration of countries with high socioeconomic development status and less vulnerability to infectious diseases mainly focused on big data, alternative methods to animal experiments.