1. Evaluating Scholars' Impact and Influence: Cross-sectional Study of the Correlation Between a Novel Social Media-Based Score and an Author-Level Citation Metric.
- Author
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Oliveira J E Silva L, Maldonado G, Brigham T, Mullan AF, Utengen A, and Cabrera D
- Subjects
- Bibliometrics, Cross-Sectional Studies, Databases, Factual, Humans, Social Media
- Abstract
Background: The development of an author-level complementary metric could play a role in the process of academic promotion through objective evaluation of scholars' influence and impact., Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the correlation between the Healthcare Social Graph (HSG) score, a novel social media influence and impact metric, and the h-index, a traditional author-level metric., Methods: This was a cross-sectional study of health care stakeholders with a social media presence randomly sampled from the Symplur database in May 2020. We performed stratified random sampling to obtain a representative sample with all strata of HSG scores. We manually queried the h-index in two reference-based databases (Scopus and Google Scholar). Continuous features (HSG score and h-index) from the included profiles were summarized as the median and IQR. We calculated the Spearman correlation coefficients (ρ) to evaluate the correlation between the HSG scores and h-indexes obtained from Google Scholar and Scopus., Results: A total of 286 (31.2%) of the 917 stakeholders had a Google Scholar h-index available. The median HSG score for these profiles was 61.1 (IQR 48.2), and the median h-index was 14.5 (IQR 26.0). For the 286 subjects with the HSG score and Google Scholar h-index available, the Spearman correlation coefficient ρ was 0.1979 (P<.001), indicating a weak positive correlation between these two metrics. A total of 715 (78%) of 917 stakeholders had a Scopus h-index available. The median HSG score for these profiles was 57.6 (IQR 46.4), and the median h-index was 7 (IQR 16). For the 715 subjects with the HSG score and Scopus h-index available, ρ was 0.2173 (P<.001), also indicating a weak positive correlation., Conclusions: We found a weak positive correlation between a novel author-level complementary metric and the h-index. More than a chiasm between traditional citation metrics and novel social media-based metrics, our findings point toward a bridge between the two domains., (©Lucas Oliveira J e Silva, Graciela Maldonado, Tara Brigham, Aidan F Mullan, Audun Utengen, Daniel Cabrera. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 31.05.2021.)
- Published
- 2021
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