Each post becomes a race for likes, retweets, or virtue signaling at the expense of critical thought or reflection. Participants remain invisible unless they retweet, like, or post a comment. Three quick tweets, each one a smiley face, count three times as much as one thoughtful tweet. Twitter-based altmetrics (number of retweets, likes, or comments a post receives) can bias which tweets drive a conversation. Alternative metrics such as saves, like retweets, favor quantity and immediate activity over quality and may not necessarily reflect sustained engagement. Altmetrics include counts of web page views, PDF downloads, comments posted on the journal web site, blogs, or web sites such as Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, ResearchGate, and as well as the number of saves to online citation managers such as Mendeley, Zotero, and CiteULike. Reading these tweets does not replace reading the full manuscript.Īlternative metrics (Altmetrics), such as the number of tweets, are designed to assess the impact of scholarly work via social media, which the canonical metric of article citations overlooks. ![]() These quips may capture important criticism, support, or background information for manuscripts. Each tweet can only be 280 characters, favoring succinct perhaps simplistic statements that are easily read on a mobile device. Tweets, however, are shorter than letters. Tweet threads harken back to when scientific communications were letters among colleagues. These two tweetchats involved 23 and 26 accounts (more than one person can use the same account simultaneously), from the United States, Australia, Poland, and Qatar, and spanned 150 tweets. For two recent #firesidetox tweetchats, JMT collaborated with its publisher Springer Nature to make the featured articles freely available via SharedIt for the week before and week after the tweetchat. Over the last two years, the American College of Medical Toxicology (ACMT) and editorial board of the Journal of Medical Toxicology (JMT) conducted quarterly tweetchats (#firesidetox) to discuss manuscripts published in JMT. Residencies in psychiatry, surgery, infectious disease, and emergency medicine have used tweetchats and tweetorials to create asynchronous journal clubs. Anyone with access to Twitter can view the discussion in real time and (re)visit the thread later. Tweet threads can draw attention to scholarly work that might otherwise be missed or lost in the deluge of daily publications. Tweets for a tweetorial may be grouped together by using a hashtag, just like tweets for a tweetchat, or each tweet in a tweetorial may be a reply to an earlier tweet. ![]() The distinction between tweetchats and tweetorials is blurry and I refer to both of them as tweet threads. ![]() A tweetorial is a collection of thematically related tweets, a twitter version of a tutorial. A tweetchat is a scheduled multi-person Twitter chat centered on a specific topic. Tweetchats and tweetorials are two ways of grouping tweets on Twitter. They do record the integration of new research findings into received medical knowledge. Tweet threads do not replace thoughtful detailed analysis. Curating tweetchats and tweetorials (collectively tweet threads) as well as linking social media discourse to primary sources provides an antidote to this distortion and leaves us with Twitter as a record of discourse that is usually not written down. In 280 characters, it is easier to virtue signal than communicate a complex or subtle thought. However, social media can distort conversations, selectively amplifying comments that curry favor rather than substantive ones. Tweetchats and tweetorials can provide a wider forum for scholarly discussion than in-person journal clubs or printed commentaries.
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