In this context I also agree with Tom that the ‘garbage’ end of the spectrum is pretty rare in our sector and tends to come from those picking up content from outside our community (e.g. the handful of nominative determinism tweets around our paper)

I think it is also worth highlighting the difference we found between lower and higher impact factor journals (JIFs). Papers published in higher JIFs do already perform well re. citations against lower JIFs, but our study found an increased Altmetric Attention Score for a paper in the lower JIFs saw a larger increase/probability of cites/citation than the higher JIFs. Smaller, lower JIFs haven’t the clout of the higher JIF titles so need to shout louder and harder to be heard and get seen, and I think this is where social media in particular plays an important role for these titles and their authors.

I think though that I’d put a pretty strong prior on there being at least some causal effect. Particularly for more specialist articles in ‘lesser’ journals, Twitter activity (etc.) *must* help make a paper more visible? Having said that, ‘possibly generating future citations’ isn’t near the top of the list of reasons why I use Twitter.

There’s also the question of what causes a paper to get mentioned. Hopefully ours isn’t one of the ‘garbage studies’ highlighted by Andrew Thaler (fwiw, I think these must be pretty rare), but a bunch of the mentions on Twitter have been to do with e.g. nominative determinism and meta-tweeting. I don’t think this really counts as science engagement, but Altmetric still counts it all.

I think correlational research is still worth doing. If someone can stand on our shoulders and work out how to test this experimentally, then great. But whatever their findings, I’ll probably keep using Twitter.