To compare the use of Twitter and other social media among leading ophthalmology journals and its impact on academic citations.

Cross-sectional study.

The tweets, accumulated citations, and Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) of all original manuscripts published in November 2017 from ten top ophthalmology journals were used to examine differences in tweeting habits among journals in ophthalmology. Multivariable linear regression analyses were performed to explore associations between tweeting, AAS, and the number of academic citations.

A total of 221 journal articles and 1602 tweets were included in this study. Each original tweet (a tweet that is not a retweet) correlated with an additional 2.566 citations (95% CI=1.555 to 3.577, P<0.001). Additionally, randomized control trial study design (β=40.122, 95% CI=8.082 to 72.141, P=0.015), the journal impact factor (β=3.376, 95% CI=0.731 to 6.022, P=0.012), and the last author h-index (β=0.233, 95% CI=0.048 to 0.418, P=0.02) were also positively correlated with more academic citations. AAS was found to be weakly associated with having more academic citations (β=0.058, 95% CI=0.005 to 0.111, P=0.022).

Original tweets and higher AAS for the articles of interest were positively associated with more academic citations for the specialty journals studied. These findings suggest a relationship between social media activity and traditional metrics of scientific influence within ophthalmology.