Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 8, 2020
Date Accepted: Sep 29, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Views: A Triple Cross Over trial of Visual Abstracts to Examine Their Impact on Research Dissemination
ABSTRACT
Background:
The visual abstract is a graphic summary of a research article’s question, methods and major findings. Though they have a number of uses, they are chiefly used to promote a research article on social media.
Objective:
To determine if the use of visual abstracts increases the visibility of nephrology research shared on Twitter.
Methods:
A prospective case-control crossover study was conducted using 40 research articles published in the American Journal of Nephrology (AJN). Each article was shared by the AJN Twitter account in 3 formats: as the article citation, as the citation with a key-figure from the article, and as the citation with a visual abstract. Tweets were spaced every two weeks to allow washout of the previous tweet, and the order of the tweets was randomized. Dissemination was measured via retweets, views, number of link clicks, and Altmetric scores.
Results:
Tweets that contain a visual abstract had more than twice as many views as text only tweets (1,351 ± 1,053 vs 639 ± 343) and nearly twice as many views as key-figure tweets (1,351 ± 1,053 vs 732 ± 464). Visual abstract tweets had 5-times the engagements of citation-only and more than 3.5-times the engagements of key-figure tweets.
Conclusions:
Tweets that contain a visual abstract had more than twice as many views as text only tweets (1,351 ± 1,053 vs 639 ± 343) and nearly twice as many views as key-figure tweets (1,351 ± 1,053 vs 732 ± 464). Visual abstract tweets had 5-times the engagements of citation-only and more than 3.5-times the engagements of key-figure tweets.
Citation
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Copyright
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