What is your h-index on Twitter?
This thought crossed my mind yesterday when I saw a tweet that was tagged #academicinsults
It occurred to me that a Twitter account is a kind of micro-publishing platform. So what would “publication metrics” look like for Twitter? Twitter makes analytics available, so they can easily be crunched. The main metrics are impressions and engagements per tweet. As I understand it, impressions are the number of times your tweet is served up to people in their feed (boosted by retweets). Engagements are when somebody clicks on the tweet (either a link or to see the thread or whatever). In publication terms, impressions would equate to people downloading your paper and engagements mean that they did something with it, like cite it. This means that a “h-index” for engagements can be calculated with these data.
For those that don’t know, the h-index for a scientist means that he/she has h papers that have been cited h or more times. The Twitter version would be a tweeter that has h tweets that were engaged with h or more times. My data is shown here:
My twitter h-index is currently 36. I have 36 tweets that have been engaged with 36 or more times.
So, this is a lot higher than my actual h-index, but obviously there are differences. Papers accrue citations as time goes by, but the information flow on Twitter is so fast that tweets don’t accumulate engagement over time. In that sense, the Twitter h-index is less sensitive to the time a user has been active on Twitter, versus the real h-index which is strongly affected by age of the scientist. Other differences include the fact that I have “published” thousands of tweets and only tens of papers. Also, whether or not more people read my tweets compared to my papers… This is not something I want to think too much about, but it would affect how many engagements it is possible to achieve.
The other thing I looked at was whether replying to somebody actually means more engagement. This would skew the Twitter h-index. I filtered tweets that started with an @ and found that this restricts who sees the tweet, but doesn’t necessarily mean more engagement. Replies make up a very small fraction of the h tweets.
I’ll leave it to somebody else to calculate the Impact Factor of Twitter. I suspect it is very low, given the sheer volume of tweets.
Please note this post is just for fun. Normal service will (probably) resume in the next post.
Edit: As pointed out in the comments this post is short on “Materials and Methods”. If you want to calculate your ownTwitter h-index, go here. When logged in to Twitter, the analytics page should present your data (it may take some time to populate this page after you first view it). A csv can be downloaded from the button on the top-right of the page. I imported this into IgorPro (as always) to generate the plots. The engagements data need to be sorted in descending order and then the h-index can be found by comparing the numbers with their ranked position.
—
The post title is from the quirky B-side to the Let It Be single by The Beatles.
