Tracking the digital footprints to scholarly articles from social media

Abstract

Scholarly articles are discussed and shared on social media, which generates altmetrics. On the opposite side, what is the impact of social media on the dissemination of scholarly articles and how to measure it? What are the visiting patterns? Investigating these issues, the purpose of this study is to seek a solution to fill the research gap, specifically, to explore the dynamic visiting patterns directed by social media, and examine the effects of social buzz on the article visits. Using the unique real referral data of 110 scholarly articles, which are daily updated in a 90-day period, this paper proposes a novel method to make analysis. We find that visits from social media are fast to accumulate but decay rapidly. Twitter and Facebook are the two most important social referrals that directing people to scholarly articles, the two are about the same and account for over 95% of the total social referral directed visits. There is synchronism between tweets and tweets resulted visits. Social media and open access are playing important roles in disseminating scholarly articles and promoting public understanding science, which are confirmed quantitatively for the first time with real data in this study.

Scholarly Communication and Open Access in Psychology: Current Considerations for Researchers

“…This does show that Twitter and Facebook visitors to scholarly articles do result in actual clicks on those publications. (Wang et al, 2016) Wider impact of these practices is not clear at this time. Researchers are analyzing whether the wide dissemination through tweets (by authors or others) and the enhanced visibility that Twitter makes possible does actually affect citation impact, as measured by various new (alternative) metrics.…”

“…Studies of sharing via Twitter, Facebook and Mendeley show at least more attention to openly published articles than those that are published in a closed access manner. (Wang, Fang, & Guo, 2016) Savvy researchers promote and market their scholarly work for greater impact using proven strategies that work with various social media. (Mollett et al, 2017) In a sense, there are methods that any author can use to market a publication, drawing attention to it.…”

Studying the accumulation velocity of altmetric data tracked by Altmetric.com

“…In a similar fashion, Moed (2005) already found that citations and downloads show different patterns of obsolescence, and about 40% of downloads accumulated within the first 6 months after publication. More recently Wang et al (2016a) using the article-level "usage counts" provided by Web of Science to investigate the usage patterns of indexed papers, identified that newly published papers accumulated more Web of Science usage counts than older papers.…”

Meet our new Trustees

“…In the era of social media, there are many ways a scientist can promote their work and engage with others Twitter has over 313 million active monthly users and Facebook has over 1.71 billion. Research has shown that social media can increase the number of journal article downloads (Wang et al, 2016& Allen et al, 2013. So why do some academics and research scientists avoid these platforms?…”