Good afternoon. Thank you for having me. My name is Adam Mikolajczyk. I am at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I'm an Associate Editor for Hepatology Communications. This afternoon I'm going to be speaking about Twitter from the perspective of a medical journal. I have no disclosures. So the Twittersphere or the landscape of Twitter for journals is rapidly growing. So this is data from 2016 that shows that in the science citation in However, there are now over 20 major gastroenterology and hepatology journals that have accounts. Fifteen of which are the top 25 journals and if we look at 2016 when that initial data was collected, that number is over doubled. If we look across the ASLD, all four of our journals have Twitter accounts and two of the four reflective of the previous data were actually created after 2016. I'll put a special plug in for hepatology. strives to publish the most impactful data possible. This is so much at the core of every journal's mission that we actually rank all of the journals on a mathematical calculation of their ability to do this in the form of the impact factor. And as I will highlight for you, Twitter can certainly enhance this impact. So this is a summary slide of the four major ways in which Twitter plays a key role in enhancing the impact of a medical journal. One, it bridges the gap between early view and print versions of an article. Two, it broadens the audience beyond those who typically subscribe to the journal. Three, it improves the interactivity of the content. And four, it contributes to new metrics of impact, which we'll discuss. So historically, if you had a article that was published, it would be assigned an issue and it would be put in the mail and people that subscribed to the journal would receive the journal and then they would read the articles. However, as time evolved, more articles were then published on a website. And when they became available on the website, a new phase of production in the journal world developed called early view. And that was when the article appeared on the journal's website, but hadn't been assigned an issue or put into print. The only way somebody would encounter that article when it was sitting on a journal's website is if you were routinely checking the journal's website to look for new content, which most people don't have the time to continually be refreshing that webpage. And so this concept of publication lag developed where there was a lag between online appearance and publication in print, until Twitter came along, in which case you were then able to tweet articles at the moment that they appear online. And then you could broadly disseminate new content rapidly as opposed to waiting for the article to be assigned to an issue printed and mailed out. Two, Twitter really broadens your audience. So again, considering the traditional model, you have a journal that's printed, put in the mail, mailed out to those subscribing to the article, the vast majority of people subscribing to the journal are going to be those who have a very vested interest in the focus of that article. So a Nash article is going to primarily be read by a hepatologist, but that article has potential relevance for many other people in other subspecialties. So the endocrinologist that's sitting all the way over on the right who's not routinely checking the liver literature may never actually encounter that article that has an impact. But when you consider Twitter, this whole schema changes. So consider the following example, looking at Twitter and social circles, which inherently create much more multidisciplinary communication. Hepatology Communications publishes a Nash article. Two hepatologists encounter that article and then retweet that article, each to their respective social circles. Within those social circles, which are unique and a much more diverse group of people, now you have endocrinologists, you have patients, cardiologists, even politicians potentially interacting with your content. And that's going to more broadly disseminate the work of the journal. Three, it increases the interactivity of the content. One of the best examples of this is something called visual abstracts, which have become a very popular complement to articles within Hepatology Communications. Visual abstracts are pictorial representations of the key findings of a study. It is not meant to just be a figure from the study that's copy and pasted into an abstract form. It's really meant to communicate the key findings to engage the viewer so that they can quickly determine, is this an article I want to interact with further or not? There's actually some nice data on visual abstracts. So this is a schematic from a prospective case control study that was published in the Annals of Surgery in 2017. And what they did was they had 44 original research articles, 22 of which were tweeted with a title and a visual abstract, and 22 which were tweeted just with the title alone. There was actually a four-week washout period and then they retweeted it in the opposite fashion. And they looked at several outcomes. Impressions, or the number of times the tweet was viewed. The retweets, or the number of times it was shared. And then article visits, the number of times the link embedded in the tweet was actually clicked upon. And what they showed, the results were very impressive. So articles that had a visual abstract had a 7.7. Furthermore, another example is journal clubs. So this is a strategy that is being routinely employed by Liver Transplantation Journal. And the traditional format of a journal club can be represented through Twitter very easily, but then you get the added benefit of linking a global audience to the authors themselves, which we don't routinely do. There are these this concept of new metrics of impact, which is becoming a very hot space for journals in general They're called alt metrics which stands for alternative metrics and what these are are a way of quantifying the popularity and attention So, the altmetric data, again, meant to summarize the popularity of that article through a wide variety of media outlets, which are depicted on the left. Each one is assigned a certain color, so you have yellow for blogs, blue for Twitter, red for Google. So, all these different sources are factored into the score, and the score is a weighted score that looks at three major components. The first component is the sources of the mentions of the article. The second is the authors. And then the third is the distribution and the volume of those mentions. And what happens is the score is assigned a certain color in the donut based upon what is making up, comprising the score. So, if you have several different colors, then you can quickly identify, well, this score is coming from this variety of sources. Again, it's not meant to replace the citation factor, but rather to be a complement to it, because it's a much more real-time metric as opposed to citations, which take time to accumulate. So, this is a really nice example of what a major difference Twitter can make into these scores. So, this is an example of a paper published in Hepatology Communications. It's one of our most cited articles. And it was assigned a score of 21. The donut is completely blue. So, it was completely derived by Twitter mentions. And you actually can look in the score, you can see the distribution globally of where this article has been tweeted and shared. And you see that this score of 21 is... So, in conclusion, Twitter enhances the impact of a medical and a scientific journal by the following, bridging the gap between early view and measuring the impact of journals, especially as more journals like Hepatology Community. and shameless plug for Hepatology Communications, at Hepcom Journal. Thank you.

Adam Mikolajczyk

University of Illinois at Chicago

Twitter

medical journal landscape

journal impact