Social Media Coverage of Scientific Articles Immediately After Publication Predicts Subsequent Citations - #SoME_Impact Score: Observational Analysis

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Social media coverage is increasingly used to spread the message of scientific publications. Traditionally, the scientific impact of an article is measured by the number of citations. At a journal level, this conventionally matures over a 2-year period, and it is challenging to gauge impact around the time of publication. OBJECTIVE: We, therefore, aimed to assess whether Web-based attention is associated with citations and to develop a predictive model that assigns relative importance to different elements of social media coverage: the #SoME_Impact score. METHODS: We included all original articles published in 2015 in a selection of the highest impact journals: The New England Jo..