About a decade ago, the old academic refrain to ‘publish or perish’ was updated to ‘be cited or perish’. A couple of days ago we published a paper arguing for a new call-to-arms: ‘share or perish’.
The truth is not too many people are perishing in the academic space. However, there is a pretty good indication that publishing in a journal that has a social media strategy makes a difference.
Want evidence? Have a look at these excerpts from our paper that compares the 18 months before the appointment of a social media editor for the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing (IJMHN) with the 18 months after that appointment.
First piece of evidence is in Figure 1 (below). Data from Twitonomy collated in 6‐monthly increments shows that after appointment of an IJMHN social media editor there was a 13½‐fold increase in tweets, and a 16‐fold increase in shared URLs.
Figure 1. Twitter Activity before and after the commencement of IJMHN social media editor on 01/01/17. Data from Twitonomy collated in 6‐monthly increments.
Figure 2 (below) plots 4 different data points.
It shows that Impressions increased from an average of 118 per day to 2839 per day. That’s a 24-fold increase on how many Twitter accounts potentially saw an @IJMHN Tweet each day.
Retweets increased from an average 62 retweets every 6 months to over 2140 retweets every 6 months. That’s a 35-fold increase in the number of time @IJMHN Tweets were shared – a remarkable increase in audience reach.
Similarly, the ‘likes’ that @IJMHN attracted increased from 45 times every 6 months to 2083 every 6 months. That’s a 46-fold increase in people acknowledging or showing approval to @IJMHN Tweets.
Most importantly, the number of times people clicked on the link (URL) of an IJMHN paper increased markedly too. It jumped from 129 to 2960 link clicks recorded every six months – a 23‐fold increase.
Figure 2. Twitter Impact before and after the commencement of IJMHN social media editor on 01/01/17. Data from Twitter Analytics collated in 6‐monthly increments.
The final data point I’ll present here is the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS), as shown in Figure 3 (below). The AAS increased from an average of 490 to 1317 every 6 months. This equates to an 169% increase in online attention and activity for IJMHN.
Figure 3. Altmetric Attention Score and Number of Articles published before and after the commencement of IJMHN social media editor on 01/01/17. Data from Altmetric collated in 6‐monthly increments.
Closing Remarks
This simplified summary of the paper misses some of the data and the description of context, the social media strategy and the reporting method. Please see the original paper for more info [link].
Want to find out more about how some of this stuff is measured? Start here: https://wiley.altmetric.com/details/62929297
Please share the link to this blog and/or to our paper about stage one of the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing social media strategy.
Don’t forget: Share or Perish!
Citation
McNamara, P. and Usher, K. (2019), Share or perish: Social media and the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, online from 30/06/19, volume and issue yet to be allocated [I’ll update this when it’s in an issue]
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.12600
URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/inm.12600
End
As always, feedback is welcomed via the comments section below.
Paul McNamara, 2 July 2019
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