{"id":3007,"date":"2018-07-26T10:45:33","date_gmt":"2018-07-26T13:45:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/?p=3007"},"modified":"2019-07-10T16:17:55","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T19:17:55","slug":"journals-presence-and-impact-on-the-social-web-towards-the-social-media-impact-factor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/2018\/07\/26\/journals-presence-and-impact-on-the-social-web-towards-the-social-media-impact-factor\/","title":{"rendered":"Journals\u2019 presence and impact on the social web: Towards the social media impact factor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Image: geralt<\/a>.<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

By Ronaldo Araujo<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Internet and web domain as a means of communication of scientific activity based on open science have provided the emergence of new forms of production, circulation, and evaluation of research results.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, people not only search the web, they also interact there! Researchers rely on more responsive filters when it comes to choosing the research sources and on channels in which they can promote their research, increasing the visibility of their work, attracting new audiences, and having their studies read by more people and, consequently, receiving more citations! This environment involves not only publishing or being available on the web, but also implies in the use of social web tools in order to be visible and increase impact.<\/p>\n

The success in adhering to social web technologies and the constant use of social media has opened up new opportunities for collaboration and information sharing in scientific activity; with that comes the emergence of new indicators to evaluate the online attention received by the research and the visibility of its results, especially those published in journal articles.<\/p>\n

While the common practice of scientists and researchers is to routinely assess the impact factor of journals in their area to determine where to submit their manuscripts, now they can also consider the social impact of the journal in the relationship that the journal establishes with the scientific community and the public.<\/p>\n

Among the new indicators that emerge in this scenario, besides altmetrics, which presents itself as an emerging field of the metric studies of scientific information in the social web, there is also social media metrics that besides evaluating impact \u2013 meaning the social media impact factor of a journal \u2013 can help editors and editorial teams manage their journals\u2019 profiles on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.<\/p>\n

Such social media metrics for journals can be enhanced in the application of digital scientific marketing as long as it is accompanied by planning and discipline from the managers. We conducted a survey that analyzed the presence and social impact of Brazilian journals on Facebook from the description of key performance indicators of their pages in this social network.<\/p>\n

Indicators were aligned with the social media metrics of visibility, influence, engagement and reputation that each one of the 67 Brazilian journals analyzed obtained on its Facebook page. The indicators are best described in Figure 1<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Social Media metrics<\/strong><\/td>\nKey performance indicator<\/strong><\/td>\nDescription<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Visibility<\/strong><\/td>\nCurrent number of fans<\/td>\nThe current quantitative number of followers that the page has.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Influence<\/strong><\/td>\nGrowth of mean number of fans<\/td>\nAverage growth of the mean number of followers in the analyzed period.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Engagement<\/strong><\/td>\n% Engagement index<\/td>\nThe value of fan engagement with the page. It is calculated by the average number of reactions and comments per day, divided by the number of fans.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
% interactions in posts<\/td>\nAverage value of reactions, comments, and fan shares for all posts.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Total number of interactions<\/td>\nTotal number of interactions (sum of reactions, comments and shares).<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Reputation<\/strong><\/td>\n% Performance index<\/td>\nThe page performance index is a combination of the engagement index value and the page fan growth. It is an indicator of the overall strength of a Facebook page.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Figure 1. Social media metrics and key performance indicators considered.<\/strong><\/p>\n

According the results of the study, the total visibility reached was of 82,123 fans, yielding on average 1,226 followers per journal page on the social network. The influence, considered by the growth rate of the number of followers, indicated only 0.44% on average. Although an average of 271.7 interactions per journal was identified, the engagement rate was not positive for 67.1% of the journals.<\/p>\n

As for the reputation, which is a key performance indicator of the pages, most journals did not reach 50% of the potential, which needs to be improved. It is considered that investing in web presence in social media such as Facebook helps in relational performance and can promote increased exposure of scientific journals in a more interactive and more engaged manner.<\/p>\n

The way a journal\u2019s page on Facebook is managed, as well as the use strategies directly influence the outcome of these indicators. The pages demand a continuous update of contents. The study identified that, combined, the journals published a total of 1,075 posts, yielding on average of 16 posts per journal, corresponding to 2.2 posts per month. However, a total of 17 journals did not publish any content in the analyzed period, which corresponds to 25%, and may indicate pages that were abandoned by their administrators.<\/p>\n

The study also verified the use of resources used in journals postings and noticed a predominance of publications with images (53%), followed by links (36%). The use of statuses (purely textual element) and videos were much less frequent. Combining these data with the engagement performance, for example, made possible to observe that images, besides being the most used resource, also guarantee the most engagement from the public, and that videos, in spite of being the least frequently used, surpass the engagement levels of other types of resources such as links and statuses.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Figure 2. Engagement Matrix<\/strong>1<\/sup>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Figure 2<\/strong> expresses the perceived engagement with regard to the public’s involvement with the page postings of the journals that varies according to the resource used.<\/p>\n

This new outlook will require that the editorial teams develop new skills in order to guarantee a good management of their journals\u2019 online web presence, and it even seems to follow the change in recent years, which is based on the general assumption that research should no longer be conducted, communicated, and evaluated only within the scientific community; that it should also move towards a more open approach and take into account its impact on society.<\/p>\n

Note<\/h3>\n

1. ARAUJO, R.F. Marketing cient\u00edfico digital e m\u00e9tricas alternativas para peri\u00f3dicos: da visibilidade ao engajamento. Perspect. ci\u00eanc. inf.<\/em> [online]. 2015, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 67-84, ISSN: 1981-5344 [viewed 26 July 2018]. DOI: 10.1590\/1981-5344\/2402<\/a>. Available from: http:\/\/ref.scielo.org\/rxhcyt<\/a><\/p>\n

References<\/h3>\n

ARAUJO, R.F. Marketing cient\u00edfico digital e m\u00e9tricas alternativas para peri\u00f3dicos: da visibilidade ao engajamento. Perspect. ci\u00eanc. inf.<\/em> [online]. 2015, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 67-84, ISSN: 1981-5344 [viewed 26 July 2018]. DOI: 10.1590\/1981-5344\/2402<\/a>. Available from: http:\/\/ref.scielo.org\/rxhcyt<\/a><\/p>\n

ARAUJO, R.F. Marketing cient\u00edfico digital e m\u00e9tricas de m\u00eddias sociais: indicadores-chave de desempenho de peri\u00f3dicos no Facebook. Inf. & Soc.: Est.<\/em> [online]. 2018, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 7-22 [viewed 26 July 2018]. DOI: 10.22478\/ufpb.1809-4783.2018v28n1.22063<\/a>. Available from: http:\/\/www.periodicos.ufpb.br\/ojs2\/index.php\/ies\/article\/view\/22063<\/a><\/p>\n

KARIMKHANI, C., GAMBLE, R. and DELLAVALLE, R.P. Social media impact factor: the top ten dermatology journals on facebook and twitter. Dermatology Online Journal [online]. 2014, vol. 20, no. 4, pp.1-4 [viewed 26 July 2018]. Available from: https:\/\/escholarship.org\/uc\/item\/4rb3w037<\/a><\/p>\n

About Ronaldo Ferreira de Araujo<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ronaldo Ferreira de Araujo is currently Associated Professor of Library Science at the Instituto de Ci\u00eancias Humanas, Comunica\u00e7\u00e3o e Artes, Universidade Federal de Alagoas<\/em> and Editor of the journal Ci\u00eancia da Informa\u00e7\u00e3o em Revista<\/em>. He is the leader of the Laboratory of Metrics and web Information (Lab-iMetrics), where he develops studies on the cybermetry and measuring information in the web, digital scientific marketing and evaluation of the academic and social impact of research results using alternative approaches.<\/p>\n

Translated from the original in Portuguese<\/a> by Lilian Nassi-Cal\u00f2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The routine practice of evaluating the journal Impact Factor to determine where to submit a manuscript has been reconsidered to the detriment of the social impact of the journal in the relationship that the journal establishes with the scientific community and the public. Social media metrics act in this direction by measuring the journal social media impact factor which may assist in managing the journals\u2019 web presence in the profiles kept on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[30,49,7,67],"class_list":["post-3007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","tag-altmetric","tag-dissemination-of-information","tag-scholarly-communication","tag-scielo-20-years"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3007"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3430,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007\/revisions\/3430"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}