Twitter should now be referred to as X: How academics, journals and publishers need to make the nomenclatural transition

Abstract

Here, we note how academics, journals and publishers should no longer refer to the social media platform Twitter as such, rather as X. Relying on Google Scholar, we found 16 examples of papers published in the last months of 2023 - essentially during the transition period between Twitter and X - that used Twitter and X, but in different ways. Unlike that transition period in which the binary Twitter/X could have been used in academic papers, we suggest that papers should no longer refer to Twitter as Twitter, but only as X, except for historical studies about that social media platform, because such use would be factually incorrect.