Effective Use of Twitter by Orthopaedic Sports Medicine Journals Can Result in Increased Impact Factor

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to determine if activity on Twitter was corelated with increasing impact factor (IF) among six orthopaedic sports medicine journals. MethodsTwitonomy software was used to collect account activity for the American Journal of Sports Medicine, The Journal of Arthroscopic and Related Surgery, Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Arthroscopy, Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery, Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, and Sports Health. Data was collected from 2000-2020. Each journal’s annual IF score was collected via Scijournal.org. A multivariate regression model was used to predict the influence of different Twitter metrics on IF from 2012-2019. The journal name, number of tweets, and the interaction of the two were used to predict IF. Additionally, Pearson correlaxtion was used to assess correlations between Twitter account metrics and IF. ResultsOver the study period, all IFs increased, except for AJSM. The effect size between number of tweets and IF was not the same for each journal. For every additional tweet, AJSM increased their IF by 0.001, (p= 0.18). Sports Health and OJSM increased their IF by 0.01 (p=0.002) and 0.022, (p=<0.001). KSSTA would expect a decrease in their IF by 0.004 (p=0.55), JSES and Arthroscopy would increase their IF by 0.002 (p=0.71) and 0.001 (p=0.99), but this was not significant. There was a statistically significant positive correlation between annual tweets and IF across all journals. ConclusionMarkers of Twitter account activity, specifically the number of annual tweets, was predictive of an increase in IF among the orthopedic sports medicine journals included in this study.