Does online attention translate into scholarly impact?

Determine whether and under what conditions online attention to research on social media, as captured by altmetrics, reliably translates into increased scholarly impact such as citation counts across disciplines and platforms.

Background

The paper situates AutoPR within the broader context of science communication and altmetrics. While social media attention is increasingly measured and sometimes correlated with citations, the causal or consistent translation of such attention into traditional scholarly impact is not established. Clarifying this relationship is important for evaluating the effectiveness of automated academic promotion and for interpreting engagement metrics in terms of scientific impact.

This unresolved issue is highlighted in the literature review, emphasizing that positive correlations alone do not settle whether social media attention reliably leads to increased citations or other conventional impact measures. Establishing this link would inform the goals and evaluation criteria of systems like PRAgent and benchmarks like PRBench.