Trial reportJournal of the American Heart Association2016
Randomized Controlled Trial of Social Media: Effect of Increased Intensity of the Intervention.
Trial report in Journal of the American Heart Association, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Examining the Effectiveness of Social Media for the Dissemination of Research Evidence for Health and Social Care Practitioners: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Pooled it
- The Use of Twitter by Medical Journals: Systematic Review of the Literature.Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Pooled it
- The Use of Social Media to Increase the Impact of Health Research: Systematic Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Pooled it
- Does social media promotion influence citation counts? A long-term follow-up to a randomised trial in a general neurosurgical journal.Neurosurgical review · 2025Trial
- A randomized controlled trial of social media promotion in neurosurgical publishing.Neurosurgical review · 2024Trial
- Citation Advantage of Promoted Articles in a Cross-Publisher Distribution Platform: 36-Month Follow-up to a Randomized Controlled Trial.Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Trial
- Optimizing the use of twitter for research dissemination: The "Three Facts and a Story" randomized-controlled trial.Journal of hepatology · 2021Trial
- To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question: A randomized trial of Twitter effects in medical education.PloS one · 2019Trial
- Effectiveness of health promotion intervention on knowledge regarding psychological dependence on the internet and social media among adolescents in South India.Journal of family medicine and primary care · 2025Article
- Promotion of a neurosurgical academic journal on social media: a 1-year experience.Acta neurochirurgica · 2023Article
- Graphical Abstract in Scientific Research.Cureus · 2023Review
- Altmetric and bibliometric analysis of obstetrics and gynecology research: influence of public engagement on citation potential.American journal of obstetrics and gynecology · 2022Article
- Users' passivity in accessing digested scientific evidence through social media: cross-sectional insights.BMC research notes · 2022Article
- Researchers in cardiology - Why and how to get on Twitter?International journal of cardiology. Heart & vasculature · 2022Review
- #Cardiotwitter: The Global Cardiology Fellowship.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2021Article
- Social Media and Research Publication Activity During Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Trend Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Article
- The impact of Twitter promotion on future citation rates: The #TweetTheJournal study.International journal of cardiology. Heart & vasculature · 2021Article
- A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Views: A Triple Crossover Trial of Visual Abstracts to Examine Their Impact on Research Dissemination.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Article
- If I tweet will you cite later? Follow-up on the effect of social media exposure on article downloads and citations.International journal of public health · 2020Observational
- Social Media Influence Does Not Reflect Scholarly or Clinical Activity in Real Life.Circulation. Arrhythmia and electrophysiology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundA prior randomized controlled trial of social media exposure at Circulation determined that social media did not increase 30-day page views. Whether insufficient social media intensity contributed to these results is uncertain. METHODS AND
resultsOriginal article manuscripts were randomized to social media exposure compared with no social media exposure (control) at Circulation beginning in January 2015. Social media exposure consisted of Facebook and Twitter posts on the journal's accounts. To increase social media intensity, a larger base of followers was built using advertising and organic growth, and posts were presented in triplicate and boosted on Facebook and retweeted on Twitter. The primary outcome was 30-day page views. Stopping rules were established at the point that 50% of the manuscripts were randomized and had 30-day follow-up to compare groups on 30-day page views. The trial was stopped for futility on September 26, 2015. Overall, 74 manuscripts were randomized to receive social media exposure, and 78 manuscripts were randomized to the control arm. The intervention and control arms were similar based on article type (P=0.85), geographic location of the corresponding author (P=0.33), and whether the manuscript had an editorial (P=0.80). Median number of 30-day page views was 499.5 in the social media arm and 450.5 in the control arm; there was no evidence of a treatment effect (P=0.38). There were no statistically significant interactions of treatment by manuscript type (P=0.86), by corresponding author (P=0.35), by trimester of publication date (P=0.34), or by editorial status (P=0.79).
conclusionsA more intensive social media strategy did not result in increased 30-day page views of original research.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.