Data from: Tweeting birds: online mentions predict future citations in ornithology

The rapid growth of online tools to communicate scientific research raises
the important question of whether online attention is associated with
citations in the scholarly literature. The Altmetric Attention Score (AAS)
quantifies the attention received by a scientific publication on various
online platforms including news, blogs and social media. It has been
advanced as a rapid way of gauging the impact of a piece of research, both
in terms of potential future scholarly citations and wider online
engagement. Here, we explore variation in the AAS of 2677 research
articles published in 10 ornithological journals between 2012 and 2016. On
average, AAS increased sevenfold in just five years, primarily due to
increased activity on Twitter which contributed 75% of the total score.
For a subset of 878 articles published in 2014, including an additional
323 ornithology articles from non-specialist journals, an increase in AAS
from 1 to 20 resulted in a predicted 112% increase in citation count from
2.6 to 5.5 citations per article. This effect interacted with journal
impact factor, with weaker effects of AAS in higher impact factor
journals. Our results suggest that altmetrics (or the online activity they
measure), as well as complementing traditional measures of scholarly
impact in ornithology such as citations, may also anticipate or even drive
them.