The relationship between tweets, citations, and article views for PLOS ONE articles

An analysis of article-level metrics of 27,856 PLOS ONE articles reveals that the number of tweets was weakly associated with the number of citations (β = 0.10), and weakly negatively associated with citations when the number of article views was held constant (β = −0.06). The number of tweets was predictive of other social media activity (β = 0.34 for Mendeley and β = 0.41 for Facebook), but not of the number of article views on PubMed Central (β = 0.01). It is concluded that the scientific citation process acts relatively independently of the social dynamics on Twitter.