Social media presence of scholarly journals

Abstract

Recently, social media has become a potentially new way for scholarly journals to disseminate and evaluate research outputs. Scholarly journals have started promoting their research articles to a wide range of audiences via social media platforms. This article aims to investigate the social media presence of scholarly journals across disciplines. We extracted journals from Web of Science and searched for the social media presence of these journals on Facebook and Twitter. Relevant metrics and content relating to the journals' social media accounts were also crawled for data analysis. From our results, the social media presence of scholarly journals lies between 7.1% and 14.2% across disciplines; and it has shown a steady increase in the last decade. The popularity of scholarly journals on social media is distinct across disciplines. Further, we investigated whether social media metrics of journals can predict the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). We found that the number of followers and disciplines have significant effects on the JIF. In addition, a word co‐occurrence network analysis was also conducted to identify popular topics discussed by scholarly journals on social media platforms. Finally, we highlight challenges and issues faced in this study and discuss future research directions.