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. 2011:2011:374-81.
Epub 2011 Oct 22.

Exploring the use of social media to measure journal article impact

Perry Evans  1 , Michael Krauthammer
Affiliations

Exploring the use of social media to measure journal article impact

Perry Evans et al. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2011.

Abstract

Science blogs, Twitter commentary, and comments on journal websites represent an immediate response to journal articles, and may help in identifying relevant publications. However, the use of these media for establishing paper impact is not well studied. Using Wikipedia as a proxy for other social media, we explore the correlation between inclusion of a journal article in Wikipedia, and article impact as measured by citation count. We start by cataloging features of PubMed articles cited in Wikipedia. We find that Wikipedia pages referencing the most journal articles are about disorders and diseases, while the most referenced articles in Wikipedia are about genomics. We note that journal articles in Wikipedia have significantly higher citation counts than an equivalent random article subset. We also observe that articles are included in Wikipedia soon after publication. Our data suggest that social media may represent a largely untapped post-publication review resource for assessing paper impact.

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Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Left: Distribution of the number of PubMed journal articles cited by a Wikipedia page. This plot is limited to Wikipedia pages that cite at least one journal article. Right: Distribution of the number of Wikipedia pages that cite a particular PubMed journal article.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
Left: Number of journal article citations in Wikipedia by publication year. Right: Number of journal article citations in Wikipedia by journal names. Blue dots indicate open access journals. Journals are restricted to those with more than 100 articles in Wikipedia.
Figure 3:
Figure 3:
Correlation between PubMed journal articles cited in Wikipedia and journal article impact, measured by a journal article’s citation count, and its Faculty of 1000 (F1000) score. The plot shows the percent of journal articles with a particular impact score that are cited in Wikipedia. The higher a journal article’s impact score, the more likely that the journal article will be cited in Wikipedia. F1000 scores were rounded to 5, and citation counts were rounded to 10. Only impact scores supported by 30 journal articles are shown.
Figure 4:
Figure 4:
Left: Months until journal article inclusion in Wikipedia for journal articles published from 2007 to 2010. Right: Months until journal article inclusion for articles published from 2004 to 2010. The inclusion time is limited to twelve months for a fair comparison across years. There is a visible trend for journal articles published in later years to be included in Wikipedia faster than journal articled published in earlier years.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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