JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The traditional model of promotion and tenure in the health professions relies heavily on formal scholarship through teaching, research, and service. Institutions then consider how much weight is given to activities in each of those three areas and determine a threshold for advancement. With the emergence of social media, scholars can now engage wider audiences in more creative ways and have a broader impact. Conventional metrics like the h-index do not account for social media impact. Social media engagement is poorly represented in most current curricula vitae (CV) and therefore is undervalued in promotion and/or tenure reviews.

Objective:

This paper presents crowdsourced guidelines on how to cite scholarly productivity on social media. These guidelines describe a process and structure for documenting and describing a scholar’s general impact on a social media platform, as well as methods of documenting individual social media contributions exemplifying innovation, education, mentorship, advocacy, and dissemination.

Methods:

To create a set of unifying guidelines, we created a crowdsourced process that capitalized on the strengths of social media and generated a case example of successful use of such a medium for productive academic collaboration. The primary author created a brief draft of the guidelines and then sought input from users on Twitter via a publicly accessible Google Document. There was no limitation on who could provide input and the work was done in a democratic, collaborative fashion. Contributors edited the draft over a period of one week (September 12-18, 2020). The primary and secondary authors then revised the draft to make it more concise. The guidelines and manuscript were then distributed to the list of contributors for edits and adopted by the group. All contributors were given the opportunity to serve as co-authors on the publication and were told upfront that authorship would be dependent upon whether they were able to document the ways in which they met the four International Committee of Medical Journal Editors authorship criteria.

Results:

The authorship team developed two sets of guidelines: “Guidelines for Listing All Social Media Scholarship Under Public Scholarship (in Research/Scholarship Section of CV)” and “Guidelines for Listing Social Media Scholarship Under Research, Teaching, and Service Sections of CV.” The content of both sets of guidelines is identical: institutions can choose which set fits their existing CV format. The authorship team was notably diverse: 18% identified as a person of color and/or underrepresented minority, 38% identified as LGBTQ+, 73% used she/her pronouns, and 23% identified as a person with a disability.

Conclusions:

With more uniformity, schools and scholars alike can better represent the full scope and impact of their work. These guidelines are not intended to dictate how individual institutions should weigh social media contributions within promotion and tenure cases. Instead, by providing an initial set of guidelines, we hope to provide scholars and their institutions with a common format and language to describe what is becoming more and more ubiquitous among academics.