[0d9eooo]

Unfortunately, I think we're already at a clickbait science level to some extent in some fields, depending on what you mean by "clickbait".

This effect would have to be replicated in some form to understand its boundaries better but if it were to generalize I think it has much broader implications than just Twitter and thoracic surgery.

There have been lots of bibliometric studies of citation impact etc. but this is one of the first times I've seen an actual experimental study in academics of this sort of thing, and it confirms what a lot of people have been experiencing, which is that actual scientific quality is only part of the reason why some work gets lots of attention. Replace twitter with other forms of social networking and the implications become clear.

There's ups and downs to this: maybe some underappreciated work would get more attention if it's marketed more, for example. But it speaks to the role of things outside of the domain of study per se (not sure what the term for this would be -- something like nondiagetic but for scientific content).