Timing and cross-platform presence shape the online dissemination of science

The increasing reliance on digital media has shifted the discussion and dissemination of academic findings to various online platforms, such as news sites, blogs, and social media, making the World Wide Web the primary source of scientific information for the broader population. However, a comprehensive understanding of the dissemination of academic articles online, especially across multiple platforms, remains limited. In this study, we examine the online dissemination patterns of academic articles by analyzing a dataset of ∼18 million posts from diverse sources that mention close to 430k articles. We employ a clustering-based approach on the time series of online mentions of research articles to discern dissemination trajectories, identifying common patterns across articles. Furthermore, these trajectories are also associated with the future academic citation count. These associations hold even after controlling for the total number of mentions, underscoring the importance of how mentions are distributed across platforms and over time, rather than just their overall volume.