A. M. Ibrahim1, K. D. Lillemoe2, M. E. Klingensmith3, J. Dimick1 1University Of Michigan,Surgery,Ann Arbor, MI, USA 2Massachusetts General Hospital,Boston, MA, USA 3Washington University,St. Louis, MO, USA
Introduction: Surgical research is growing at an unprecedented rate making it increasingly difficult for surgeons to keep up to date. In response, many academic journals have adopted social media services, including Twitter, to disseminate their publications. It is unclear, however, what the most effective social media formats are to disseminate surgical research.
Methods: More than 1.6 million impressions were analyzed from the Twitter account of Annals of Surgery between January and August of 2016. Data was obtained and merged from three sources: Twitter Analytics, Altmetric and Symplur. We assed three different types of Tweets (Figure 1) that were introduced in a stepwise fashion over the study period beginning with (1) title alone, then (2) title with figure, and finally (3) a visual abstract. Our primary outcomes used to measure dissemination included impressions (number of times a tweet was seen), retweets (number of times a tweet was shared) and article views (number of times a tweet led to a view on the article on publisher website.)
Results: We found a strong correlation between the use of visual tweets and extent of dissemination. When only article titles were tweeted, the account averaged per week, 40,863 impressions, 83 retweets and 643 article views. However, after introduction of tweets including article figures and visual abstracts, the account averaged per week 108,987 impressions (2.6 fold increase), 416 retweets (5.1 fold increase) and 1092 article views (1.7 fold increase.) Further, individual tweets with a visual abstract were able to achieve >15,000 impressions and >100 retweets within one week compared to only ~4,600 impressions and ~22 retweets for tweets including only the article title. Subset analysis of selected articles with a Visual Abstract revealed that65% of article views on the publisher website were attributed to discovery through Twitter.
Conclusions: Social Media, including Twitter, is an effective platform to disseminate surgical science. The use of visual abstracts was associated with higher levels of dissemination as measured by impressions, shares and article visits on the publishers website. All academic researchers and publishers should consider using visual design and social media to make their research more engaging and accessible.
