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