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Articles that feature in open access journals are more likely to be cited on Twitter, a major study of how research is shared has found.

Kim Holmberg, a research associate at the University of Turku in Finland, has conducted a study looking at around 4 million ¡°altmetric events¡± ¨C the sharing of research using tools like Facebook and the academic bookmarking tool Mendeley - which might shed light on the impact of scholarly work beyond the traditional measure of citations by other academics. ?

Speaking to a conference on altmetrics on 8 October in Amsterdam, Dr Holmberg presented the preliminary findings, which showed that open access journals and articles have a ¡°big advantage¡± when it comes to being shared on Twitter compared with those behind a paywall.

They were also more likely to be shared on Facebook, although to a lesser extent, he told the 2am:Amsterdam conference.

However, on Mendeley and Wikipedia, articles behind a paywall were relatively more likely to be cited.

This finding was ¡°logical¡± that because Mendeley users were researchers, and so were more likely to use paywalled articles, he said. Conversely, the results indicate that on Twitter ¡°the attention might come from a wider audience¡±, Dr Holmberg said.?

david.matthews@tesglobal.com