Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 16, 2021
Date Accepted: May 6, 2021
Evaluating scholars’ impact and influence: a correlation study between a novel social media-based score and author-level citation metrics
ABSTRACT
Background:
The development of an author-level alternative metric could play a role in the process of academic promotion through objective evaluation of digital scholarship.
Objective:
To evaluate the correlation between the healthcare social graph (HSG) score, a novel social media influence metric, and the h-index, a traditional author-level metric.
Methods:
This was a cross-sectional study of healthcare stakeholders with a social media presence randomly sampled from the Symplur’s Healthcare Social Graph® database on May 2020. We performed a stratified random sampling in order to have a representative sample of all strata of HSG scores. We manually queried the h-index in two reference-based databases (Scopus and Google Scholar). Continuous features (HSG score and h-index) from included profiles were summarized as median and interquartile ranges (IQR). We calculated Spearman correlation coefficients (p) to evaluate the correlation between HSG scores and the h-index obtained by Google Scholar and Scopus.
Results:
A total of 286 (31.2%) of 917 stakeholders had a Google Scholar h-index available. The median HSG score for these profiles was 61.1 (IQR 48.2), and the median h-index was 14.5 (IQR 26.0). For the 286 subjects with both HSG score and Google Scholar h-index available, the correlation coefficient was 0.1979 (p < 0.001), indicating a weak positive correlation between these two metrics. A total of 715 (78%) of 917 stakeholders had a Scopus h-index available. The median HSG score for these profiles was 57.6 (IQR 46.4), and the median h-index was 7 (IQR 16). For the 715 subjects with both HSG score and Scopus h-index available, the correlation coefficient was 0.2173 (p < 0.001), also indicating a weak positive correlation.
Conclusions:
We found a positive weak correlation between a novel author-level alternative metric and h-index. More than a chiasm between traditional citation metrics and novel digital scholarships tools, our findings point towards a bridge between the two domains.
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