Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

skip to main content
research-article

WeChat uptake of chinese scholarly journals: an analysis of CSSCI-indexed journals

Published: 01 December 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The study of how science is discussed and how scholarly actors interact on social media has increasingly become popular in the field of scientometrics in recent years. While most prior studies focused on research outputs discussed on global platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook, the presence of scholarly journals on local platforms was seldom studied, especially in the Chinese social media context. To fill this gap, this study investigates the uptake of WeChat (a Chinese social network app) by the Chinese scholarly journals indexed by the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI). The results show that 65.3% of CSSCI-indexed journals have created WeChat public accounts and posted over 193 thousand WeChat posts in total. At the journal level, bibliometric indicators (e.g., citations, downloads, and journal impact factors) and WeChat indicators (e.g., clicks, likes, replies, and recommendations) are weakly correlated with each other, reinforcing the idea of fundamentally differentiated dimensions of indicators between bibliometrics and social media metrics. Results also show that journals with WeChat public accounts slightly outperform those without WeChat public accounts in terms of citation impact, suggesting that the WeChat presence of scientific journals is mostly positively associated with their citation impact.

References

[1]
Boulos, M. N. K., & Anderson, P. F. (2012). Preliminary survey of leading general medicine journals ’ use of Facebook and Twitter 1. Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, 33(2), 38–47.
[2]
Chan TM, Thoma B, Arora VM, and Trueger NS The social media editor at medical journals: responsibilities, goals, barriers, and facilitators HHS Public Access 2020 94 5 701-707
[3]
Chiang AL, Rabinowitz LG, Alakbarli J, Chan WW, and Chiang AL The patterns and impact of social media exposure of journal publications in gastroenterology: Retrospective cohort study Journal of Medical Internet Research 2021 23 1-8
[4]
Cosco TD Medical journals, impact and social media: An ecological study of the Twittersphere Canadian Medical Association Journal 2015 187 18 1353-1357
[5]
Costas, R., Haustein, S., Zahedi, Z., Larivière, V. (2016). Exploring paths for the normalization of altmetrics: Applying the Characteristic Scores and Scales. The 2016 Altmetrics Workshop, Bucharest, Romania. http://altmetrics.org/altmetrics16/
[6]
Costas R “Heterogeneous couplings” : Operationalizing network perspectives to study science-society interactions through social media metrics Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 2021 72 595-610
[7]
Costas R, Zahedi Z, and Wouters P The thematic orientation of publications mentioned on social media metrics with citations Aslib Journal of Information Management 2015 67 3 260-288
[8]
Costas R, Zahedi Z, and Wouters P Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 2015 66 10 2003-2019
[9]
Díaz-Faes AA, Bowman TD, and Costas R Towards a second generation of ‘social media metrics’: Characterizing Twitter communities of attention around science PLoS ONE 2019 14 5
[10]
Forkosh-baruch A and Hershkovitz A Internet and Higher Education A case study of Israeli higher-education institutes sharing scholarly information with the community via social networks The Internet and Higher Education 2012 15 1 58-68
[11]
Gan C and Wang W Uses and gratifications of social media : A comparison of microblog and WeChat Journal of Systems and Information Technology 2015 17 4 351-363
[12]
Hammarfelt B Using altmetrics for assessing research impact in the humanities Scientometrics 2014 101 2 1419-1430
[13]
Haunschild R and Bornmann L Field- and time-normalization of data with many zeros: An empirical analysis using citation and Twitter data Scientometrics 2018 116 997-1012
[14]
Haustein, S. (2016). Scholarly Twitter metrics. In Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research (pp. 1–40). https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02201
[15]
Haustein, S., Bowman, T. D., & Costas, R. (2016). Interpreting “altmetrics”: viewing acts on social media through the lens of citation and social theories. In Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication (pp. 1–24).
[16]
Haustein S, Costas R, and Larivière V Characterizing social media metrics of scholarly papers: The effect of document properties and collaboration patterns PLoS ONE 2015 10 5
[17]
Hui C and Cao Y Examining WeChat users ’ motivations, trust, attitudes, and positive word-of-mouth : Evidence from China Computers in Human Behavior 2014 41 104-111
[18]
Karmakar M, Kumar S, Vivek B, and Singh K Does presence of social media plugins in a journal website result in higher social media attention of its research Scientometrics 2020 124 2103-2143
[19]
Kelly BS, Redmond CE, Nason GJ, Healy GM, Horgan NA, and Heffernan EJ The use of twitter by radiology journals: An analysis of twitter activity and impact factor Journal of the American College of Radiology 2016 13 11 1391-1396
[20]
Kortelainen T and Katvala M "everything is plentiful—except attention". Attention data of scientific journals on social web tools Journal of Informetrics 2012 6 4 661-668
[22]
Mao C Friends and relaxation : Key factors of undergraduate students ’ wechat using Creative Education 2014 5 636-640
[23]
McNamara P and Usher K Share or perish: Social media and the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing International Journal of Mental Health Nursing 2019 28 4 960-970
[24]
Nason GJ, Kelly FO, Kelly ME, Phelan N, Manecksha RP, Lawrentschuk N, and Murphy DG The emerging use of Twitter by urological journals Surgical Education 2015 115 3 486-490
[25]
Raamkumar AS and Rasmussen E Understanding the twitter usage of humanities and social sciences academic journals Proceedings of the Association for Information Science & Technology 2018 55 1 1-10
[26]
Rowlands I, Nicholas D, Russell B, Canty N, Watkinson A, Canty N, and Canty N Social media use in the research workflow Learned Publishing 2011 24 3 183-195
[27]
Science on WeChat. (2020). Nature Methods, 17(September), 863.
[28]
Sugimoto CR, Work S, Larivière V, and Haustein S Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics : A review of the literature Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology 2017 68 9 2037-2062
[29]
Tenopir C, Volentine R, and King DW Social media and scholarly reading Online Information Review 2013 37 2 193-216
[30]
Thelwall M Measuring social impacts of research with Altmetrics? Journal of Economic Surveys 2021
[31]
Tweet, tweet. (2020). Nature Methods, 17(6), 553.
[32]
Wang, Y., Li, Y., & Tang, J. (2015). Dwelling and fleeting encounters: Exploring why people use WeChat - A mobile instant messenger. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – Proceedings (Vol. 18, pp. 1543–1548). Association for Computing Machinery.
[33]
Wang X, Deng Y, Lü X, Zhang X, and Yang L The usage of WeChat to promote academic publishing in China : A case study on Chinese Laser Press Learned Publishing 2020 33 187-191
[34]
Wei Q and Yang Y WeChat Library : A new mode of mobile library service The Electronic Library 2017 35 1 198-208
[35]
Wouters, P., Zahedi, Z., & Costas, R. (2019). Social media metrics for new research evaluation. In Springer handbook of science and technology indicators (pp. 687–713). Springer, Cham. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.10541
[36]
Xu, S. (2019). A sneak peek at scholarly communication on WeChat “Official Accounts”. https://www.altmetric.com/blog/a-sneak-peek-at-scholarly-communication-on-wechat-official-accounts/
[37]
Xu J, Kang Q, Song Z, and Peter C The Journal of academic librarianship applications of mobile social media : WeChat among academic libraries in China The Journal of Academic Librarianship 2015 41 1 21-30
[38]
Yu H, Xu S, Xiao T, Hemminger BM, and Yang S Global science discussed in local altmetrics: Weibo and its comparison with Twitter Journal of Informetrics 2017 11 2 466-482
[39]
Zahedi, Z. (2017) What explains the imbalance use of social media across different countries? A cross country analysis of presence of Twitter users tweeting scholarly publications. 4:AM Conference (Altmetrics).
[40]
Zhang X, Ji Y, and You B Operation on WeChat official accounts of Chinese academic journals with high WCI and its implications Chinese Journal of Scientific and Technical Periodicals 2018 29 6 574-584
[41]
Zhao R and Wei M Academic impact evaluation of WeChat in view of social media perspective Scientometrics 2017 112 1777-1791
[42]
Zheng H et al. Social media presence of scholarly journals Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 2019 70 3 256-270

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)The effect of social media knowledge cascade: an analysis of scientific papers diffusionScientometrics10.1007/s11192-023-04785-4128:9(5169-5195)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2023

Recommendations

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Scientometrics
Scientometrics  Volume 127, Issue 12
Dec 2022
955 pages

Publisher

Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 01 December 2022
Accepted: 09 March 2022
Received: 25 October 2021

Author Tags

  1. Altmetrics
  2. Social media metrics
  3. WeChat
  4. Scholarly journals
  5. Chinese social sciences citation index

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Funding Sources

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)0
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 28 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)The effect of social media knowledge cascade: an analysis of scientific papers diffusionScientometrics10.1007/s11192-023-04785-4128:9(5169-5195)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2023

View Options

View options

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media