Citation

Abou-Ismail MY, van der Wal DE, Cheong MA, Masten A, Blount L, Brown MC. Res. Pract. Thromb. Haemost. 2024; 8(3): e102387.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1016/j.rpth.2024.102387

PMID

38617045

PMCID

PMC11015501

Abstract

Social media platforms offer a unique opportunity for scientific literature to reach a large audience. Rather than requiring an individual to search for the terms that lead to a piece of scientific work, social media allows scientists and journals to actively disseminate their work to a large network. This allows instantaneous promotion of scientific work to a large audience and promotes dissemination, discussion, and collaboration. In 2017, it was estimated that 1% to 5% of the 187 million active users on X (formerly Twitter) were active scientists. Journal engagement in social media is on the rise. A recent study demonstrated that as of early 2022, 25.2% of all journals listed in Web of Science's 3 major indices had a dedicated presence on X. This represented a substantial percentage increase from just 0.1% in 2007, which continued to grow, reaching 2.9% in 2010, 11.8% in 2015, and 22.8% in 2020. These findings underscore a swiftly and continuously expanding overlap between social media and scholarly communication, highlighting the growing significance of digital platforms in disseminating scientific information.

Social media engagement has been shown to correlate with citation rates, and a single randomized controlled study found that tweeted articles achieved higher change in citation number in 1 year as compared with nontweeted articles. Both Research and Practice in Thrombosis and Haemostasis (RPTH) and Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis (JTH), the journals of the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH), maintain an active social media presence. Both journals actively promote every published article through social media channels. ISTH has recognized the importance of social media for dissemination of science, starting the X accounts for both journals in 2016. Additionally, JTH started a presence on LinkedIn in 2022. While there is increasing data supporting the role of social media in scientific publication, there remains a paucity of data related to the impact on authors. This study aims to investigate author perspectives on the use of social media for promotion of their unique scientific work, as well as the amount of traffic generated to the RPTH and JTH websites via social media.

Language: en

Keywords

information dissemination; journal impact factor; social media