Uso de redes sociales e impacto en las métricas de citación: el caso de infectologia, 2020

Abstract

Introduction: Social media has recently become a source for scientific information and interaction for reader and investigator. Given their recent interest and importance, alternative metrics have been introduced to measure the impact of publications and scientific journals in social media. However, it is unknow if there is a correlation between infectiology journals’ activity in social media and the traditional measures of impact based on the number of citations, such as the Scimago Journal Rank or the H index. Objective: To evaluate the correlation between the impact factor and the alternative metrics based in social media in infectiology scientific journals. Methods: The infectiology scientific journals were identified from the Scimago of Scopus®️ database and extracted the information about the traditional impact metrics. Additionally, the alternative metrics were determined based on the activities of social media platforms in Twitter®️, Facebook®️, YouTube®️ and Instagram®️. Their correlation was determined using the Spearman(rs) coefficient. Results: Out of a total of 265 journals were included, 86 (34.2%) of them had social media presence in the platforms evaluated. The median SJR (1.06 vs 0.63, p <0.05) and the H index (41 vs 26, p <0.05) were significantly greater in journals with a social media presence, while the global correlation between the SJR index and the number of followers on Twitter®️ was moderate (rs 0.63 p < 0.01). The SJR and the number of tweets had a moderate correlation (rs= 0.65, p <0.001), which was high in the journals of North America (rs= 0.81, p <0.001). Conclusions: Our study suggests a moderate correlation between the alternative metrics activity on social media (primarily Twitter®️), compared to the traditional metrics activity based on number of citations in infectiology journals.