Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 21, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 25, 2018 - Nov 20, 2018
Date Accepted: Jun 12, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Social media coverage of scientific articles immediately after publication predicts subsequent citations: #SoMe_Impact Score
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social media coverage is increasingly used to spread the message of scientific publications. Traditionally, the scientific impact of an article is measured by the number of citations. At a journal level, this conventionally matures over a two-year period and it is challenging to gauge impact around the time of publication.
Objective:
to assess whether online attention is associated with citations and to develop a predictive model that assigns relative importance to different elements of social media coverage: the #SoMe_Impact score.
Methods:
We included all original articles published in 2015 in a selection of the highest-impact journals: The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), The Lancet, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Nature, Cell and Science. We first characterised the change in Altmetric score over time by taking a single month’s sample of recently published articles from the same journals and gathered Altmetric data daily from the time of publication to create a mixed-effects spline models. We then obtained the overall weighted Altmetric score for all articles from 2015, the unweighted data for each Altmetric component and the two-year citation count from Scopus for each of these articles for 2016-2017. We created a stepwise multivariable linear regression model to develop a #SoME_Score that was predictive of two-year citations. The score was validated using a dataset of articles from the same journals published in 2016.
Results:
In our unselected sample of 145 recently published articles, social media coverage appeared to plateau approximately 14 days after publication. A total of 3,150 articles with a median citation count of 16 (IQR 5-33) and Altmetric score of 72 (IQR 28-169) were included for analysis. On multivariable regression, compared to articles in the lowest quantile of #SoME_Score, articles in the second, third and upper quantile had 21.2, 44.2 and 99.2 more citations, respectively. On the validation dataset, #SoME_Score model outperformed the Altmetric score (adjusted R2 0.17 vs 0.06, P<.001).
Conclusions:
Social media attention predicts citations and could be used as an early surrogate measure of scientific impact. Due to the cross-sectional study design, we cannot determine whether correlation relates to causation. Clinical Trial: NA
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
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