Having only joined Twitter in 2016, Clayton Lamb is a self-described social media neophyte. It was only when a journal he was submitting an article to asked him for his Twitter handle that he was spurred to sign up.
"I thought, I better get on board, because they are going to be talking about my research and I won't be part of the conversation,'" says Mr. Lamb, who is a year and half away from completing his PhD in ecology at the University of Alberta.
It was from this interaction that his curiosity was piqued: does communicating one's research through social media result in higher citations for published research? Along with two other ecologists (Sophie Gilbert, an assistant professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Idaho and Adam Ford, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia), Mr. Lamb has published a study on the correlation between altmetrics (alternative or non-traditional impact factors) and citations. The three researchers looked at 8,300 ecology and conservation papers published between 2005 and 2015, culling each article's citations, altmetric attention score and other descriptive data. They found a strong correlation between citation rates and science communication through social media.
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