Using social media to promote academic research: Identifying the benefits of twitter for sharing academic work

To disseminate research, scholars once relied on university media services or journal press releases, but today any academic can turn to Twitter to share their published work with a broader audience.The possibility that scholars can push their research out, rather than hope that it is pulled in, holds the potential for scholars to draw wide attention to their research.In this manuscript, we examine whether there are systematic differences in the types of scholars who most benefit from this push model.Specifically, we investigate the extent to which there are gender differences in the dissemination of research via Twitter.We carry out our analyses by tracking tweet patterns for articles published in six journals across two fields (political science and communication), and we pair this Twitter data with demographic and educational data about the authors of the published articles, as well as article citation rates.We find considerable evidence that, overall, article citations are positively correlated with tweets about the article, and we find little evidence to suggest that author gender affects the transmission of research in this new media.Social media provide academics with one of the most direct routes for sharing their work.To disseminate research, scholars once relied on university media services or journal press releases, but today any academic can turn to Twitter to share their published findings with a broader audience that stretches well beyond their friends, family, or even academic community.In this manuscript, we provide a broad empirical investigation of whether Twitter offers any advantage to academics who share their work via social media.We then turn to the more specific question of whether Twitter offers an equitable benefit to all academics who participate, or if instead it simply exacerbates inequalities in research dissemination that exist "offline."In considering these inequalities, we focus on the specific case of gender.Relying on social media, researchers can reach practitioners, journalists, and the public at large [1,2,3,4].Twitter seems to offer tremendous benefits [5], especially given increasing