We analyze the online response of the scientific community to the preprint
blication of scholarly articles. We employ a cohort of 4,606 scientific
ticles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and
ril 2011. We study three forms of reactions to these preprints: how they are
wnloaded on the arXiv.org site, how they are mentioned on the social media
te Twitter, and how they are cited in the scholarly record. We perform two
alyses. First, we analyze the delay and time span of article downloads and
itter mentions following submission, to understand the temporal configuration
these reactions and whether significant differences exist between them.
cond, we run correlation tests to investigate the relationship between
itter mentions and both article downloads and article citations. We find that
itter mentions follow rapidly after article submission and that they are
rrelated with later article downloads and later article citations, indicating
at social media may be an important factor in determining the scientific
pact of an article.

The use of citation counts to assess the impact of research articles is well established. However, the citation impact of an article can only be measured several years after it has been published. As research articles are increasingly accessed through the Web, the number of times an article is downloaded can be instantly recorded and counted. One would expect the number of times an article is read to be related both to the number of times it is cited and to how old the article is. The authors analyze how short-term Web usage impact predicts medium-term citation impact. The physics e-print archive—arXiv.org—is used to test this.