Abstract
A barrier to dissemination of research is that it depends on the end-user searching for or ‘pulling’ relevant knowledge from the literature base. Social media instead ‘pushes’ relevant knowledge straight to the end-user, via blogs and sites such as Facebook and Twitter. That social media is very effective at improving dissemination seems well accepted, but, remarkably, there is no evidence to support this claim. We aimed to quantify the impact of social media release on views and downloads of articles in the clinical pain sciences. Sixteen PLOS ONE articles were blogged and released via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and ResearchBlogging.org on one of two randomly selected dates. The other date served as a control. The primary outcomes were the rate of HTML views and PDF downloads of the article, over a seven-day period. The critical result was an increase in both outcome variables in the week after the blog post and social media release. The mean ± SD rate of HTML views in the week after the social media release was 18±18 per day, whereas the rate during the other three weeks was no more than 6±3 per day. The mean ± SD rate of PDF downloads in the week after the social media release was 4±4 per day, whereas the rate during the other three weeks was less than 1±1 per day (p<0.05 for all comparisons). However, none of the recognized measures of social media reach, engagement or virality related to either outcome variable, nor to citation count one year later (p>0.3 for all). We conclude that social media release of a research article in the clinical pain sciences increases the number of people who view or download that article, but conventional social media metrics are unrelated to the effect.
Highlights
The impact of research is fundamentally dependent on how well it is disseminated to the end-user
The rate of HTML views was higher either side of the social media release than it was either side of the control date (main effect of Date on HTML views – F(1,15) = 7.39, p = 0.016)
Visual inspection of the data (Fig. 3) show that these main effects were driven to a large extent by an interaction, such that the social media release was associated with a larger increase in the rate of HTML views than the control date was (Week x Date interaction: F(1,15) = 7.39, p 0.016)
Summary
The impact of research is fundamentally dependent on how well it is disseminated to the end-user. Health and medical research is no exception - high profile journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) have established cohesive digital strategies that incorporate both blogs and social media sites (Table S1), presumably in the hope of improving the dissemination of knowledge. This approach contrasts with the pull approach insofar as it ‘pushes’ the knowledge to the end-user [1].
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