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Twitter and the spread of academic knowledge

Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.

I’ve covered this prettyextensively on New Things Under the Sun, and one theme has been that scientists/inventors have various ways of keeping up with relevant new discoveries: they read journals, attend conferences, talk with people in their professional circle, etc. We could also look at article page views or downloads, but citations arguably provide a stronger signal both that an academic author learned about an idea and thought it was related to their work. These levels seem plausible to me - as a point of comparison, Azoulay, Wahlen, and Zuckerman Sivan (2019) find that elite life scientists who unexpectedly pass away and are subsequently memorialized in journal articles see a similarly sized bump to citations to their work.

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