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The following is a summary of “Association of Twitter author Altmetric patterns with research impact in ophthalmology,” published in the April 2025 issue of International Ophthalmology by Buscho et al. 

Researchers conducted a retrospective study to examine how Twitter activity among authors, institutions, and journals influenced the academic impact of ophthalmology research articles.  

They collected data from 1,086 research articles published in the top 7 ophthalmology journals, as ranked by SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), from 2021 issues. Article citation captures and Twitter metrics were obtained using the Scopus database and PlumX Metrics on Scopus.  

The results showed a significant positive correlation between citations, captures, and total tweets, including self-tweets by authors (P < 0.0001). Articles tweeted by at least 1 author had a 1.7-fold increase in citations (P = 0.0012). First-author tweets were linked to significantly higher citations (P = 0.0329), while tweets from senior or middle authors had no significant impact. Institutional and journal tweets about an article were associated with increased citations (P < 0.0001 and P = 0.0025, respectively) and capture (P < 0.0001 and P = 0.0025, respectively).  

Investigators concluded that Twitter mentions of ophthalmology articles had likely indicated the subsequent academic influence, suggesting that authors of recent ophthalmology publications, journals, and academic institutions could have benefited from promoting research articles on Twitter to enhance visibility and citations. 

Source: link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10792-025-03514-5