Documenting Social Media Engagement as Scholarship: A New Model for Assessing Academic Accomplishment for the Health Professions

Abstract

Background The traditional model of promotion and tenure in the health professions relies heavily on formal scholarship through teaching, research, and service. Institutions consider how much weight to give activities in each of these areas and determine a threshold for advancement. With the emergence of social media, scholars can engage wider audiences in 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 curricula vitae (CV) and therefore is undervalued in promotion and tenure reviews. Objective The objective was to develop crowdsourced guidelines for documenting social media scholarship. These guidelines aimed to provide a structure for documenting a scholar’s general impact on social media, as well as methods of documenting individual social media contributions exemplifying innovation, education, mentorship, advocacy, and dissemination. Methods To create unifying guidelines, we created a crowdsourced process that capitalized on the strengths of social media and generated a case example of successful use of the medium for academic collaboration. The primary author created a 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 1 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 contributors for edits and adopted by the group. All contributors were given the opportunity to serve as coauthors on the publication and were told upfront that authorship would depend on whether they were able to document the ways in which they met the 4 International Committee of Medical Journal Editors authorship criteria. Results We developed 2 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. Institutions can choose which set fits their existing CV format. Conclusions With more uniformity, scholars 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 document social media scholarship.

How the Field of Infectious Diseases Can Leverage Digital Strategy and Social Media Use During a Pandemic

“…As social media becomes more part of scientific and medical communications, more data will be needed to understand how metrics track with outcomes. Some have reported on how social media engagement can be leverages for scholarship in assessing academic accomplishments [ 17 , 29 ]. Many websites and social media platforms measure traffic and engagement, and this information can be used to quantify effective and ineffective approaches.…”

Establishing and Facilitating Large-Scale Manuscript Collaborations via Social Media: Novel Method and Tools for Replication

“…The authorship team was notably diverse (Table 1). To view the diverse array of degrees, licenses, and certifications held by the authorship team, you can view the article online [7].…”

“…This manuscript is narrowly focused on describing the method used to establish and facilitate a large-scale collaboration using social media. The manuscript titled "Documenting Social Media Engagement as Scholarship: A New Model for Assessing Academic Accomplishment for the Health Professions" [7] presents the guidelines created through the process described in this manuscript, while the manuscript titled "The Benefits of Using Social Media as a Health Professional in Academia" (unpublished) examines the benefits of social media engagement.…”

The Numerous Benefits of Social Media for Medicine. Comment on “Documenting Social Media Engagement as Scholarship: A New Model for Assessing Academic Accomplishment for the Health Professions”

“…In their recent paper, Acquaviva et al [1] developed a set of guidelines to standardize curriculum vitae (CV) documentation of scholarly contributions made via social media platforms. Appropriately, the authors crowd-sourced contributions for the guidelines from the popular social media platform Twitter.…”

“…We are thankful to Acquaviva and associates [1] for providing us with much-needed guidelines that allow for the documentation of education portfolios representative of today's evolving medical education environment.…”