ArticlePloS one2018
Social impact in social media: A new method to evaluate the social impact of research.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Using Social Media to Maximize the Research Impact of Surgeons: Exploratory Linguistic Analysis.JMIR formative research · 2026Article
- The art of sharing: From research to outreach in the social media era.Experimental physiology · 2026Article
- Online Interventions Addressing Health Misinformation: Scoping Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- The Erosion of Healthcare and Scientific Integrity: A Growing Concern.Journal of healthcare leadership · 2025Review
- Article
- The correlation between altmetric score and traditional measures of article impact for studies pertaining to spine trauma.European spine journal : official publication of the European Spine Society, the European Spinal Deformity Society, and the European Section of the Cervical Spine Research Society · 2024Review
- Article
- When the Media Omits or Includes Scientific Evidence in Its Publications: Science and Battles on X about Child Sexual Abuse.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Social media and the Journal of Neuro-Oncology.Journal of neuro-oncology · 2023Article
- The Long-COVID Experience Changed People's Vaccine Hesitancy but Not Their Vaccination Fear.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- African Swine Fever-How to Unravel Fake News in Veterinary Medicine.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Delivery structure of nationalism message on Twitter in the context of Indonesian netizens.Social network analysis and mining · 2022Article
- The Effective Trends and Driving Forces in The Future of Research Performance Evaluation: A Qualitative Study.Medical journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran · 2022Review
- Introducing the EMPIRE Index: A novel, value-based metric framework to measure the impact of medical publications.PloS one · 2022Article
- Characterizing the role of bots' in polarized stance on social media.Social network analysis and mining · 2022Article
- hGLUTEN Tool: Measuring Its Social Impact Indicators.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Subspecialty Variation in Academic Citations of Orthopedic Surgery Publications.Clinics in orthopedic surgery · 2021Article
- Citizen Debates in Social Networks about Didactic Resources for Mathematics.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Fear of missing out: A brief overview of origin, theoretical underpinnings and relationship with mental health.World journal of clinical cases · 2021Review
- What is trending in paediatric dentistry? An Altmetric study on paediatric dentistry journals.European archives of paediatric dentistry : official journal of the European Academy of Paediatric Dentistry · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The social impact of research has usually been analysed through the scientific outcomes produced under the auspices of the research. The growth of scholarly content in social media and the use of altmetrics by researchers to track their work facilitate the advancement in evaluating the impact of research. However, there is a gap in the identification of evidence of the social impact in terms of what citizens are sharing on their social media platforms. This article applies a social impact in social media methodology (SISM) to identify quantitative and qualitative evidence of the potential or real social impact of research shared on social media, specifically on Twitter and Facebook. We define the social impact coverage ratio (SICOR) to identify the percentage of tweets and Facebook posts providing information about potential or actual social impact in relation to the total amount of social media data found related to specific research projects. We selected 10 projects in different fields of knowledge to calculate the SICOR, and the results indicate that 0.43% of the tweets and Facebook posts collected provide linkages with information about social impact. However, our analysis indicates that some projects have a high percentage (4.98%) and others have no evidence of social impact shared in social media. Examples of quantitative and qualitative evidence of social impact are provided to illustrate these results. A general finding is that novel evidences of social impact of research can be found in social media, becoming relevant platforms for scientists to spread quantitative and qualitative evidence of social impact in social media to capture the interest of citizens. Thus, social media users are showed to be intermediaries making visible and assessing evidence of social impact.
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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.