Scientific Journals' Twitter Accounts and Impact Factor: A Causal Analysis Based on a Synthetic Control

Abstract

Does a journal’s actively curated Twitter account cause a rise in Journal Impact Factor (JIF)? The present paper analyses this causal assumption by looking at the JIF trajectories of various journals that set up a Twitter account in 2015. Having identified one suitable journal (namely, International Sociology), a counterfactual unit was generated with the the synthetic control method, a control unit that resembles the same journal but one that would not have registered a Twitter account in 2015. That control unit is synthetised via dozens of other journals that exhibit similar characteristics like the treated unit. The paper finds that the actual International Sociology enjoyed higher JIFs than its counterfactual control unit after 2015. The scale of this effect, however, is negligible and the finding is statistically insignificant. The main result of this paper, therefore, is that the null hypothesis claiming no-effect-of-Twitter-upon-JIF cannot be rejected.