Twitter mentions and academic citations in the urologic oncology literature.

70Background: Social media use has dramatically increased in academic medicine with over 70% of journals now using twitter accounts. This calls into question if there is a measurable association between academic impact and Twitter use. We sought to quantify the relationship between the number of Twitter mentions and the number of academic citations a urologic oncology publication receives. Methods: 210 papers from 7 prominent urology journals were examined 18 months after publication from December 2014-January 2015. Articles were evaluated with 2 citation based “bibliometrics” (Scopus, Google Scholar) and 1 social media based metric (Altmetric). Altmetric software allowed for individual tweets regarding an article to be examined. Scores and Twitter mentions for oncology and non-oncology publications were compared using ANOVA and contingency analysis. Results: 79 articles were oncology related while 131 pertained to other topics. The mean number of Twitter mentions for oncology articles was 4.1, compared t...