Presentation at AMIA 2013 Washington DC, Nov 19th, Panel S50 Social Media and Me. I am focussing on the use of social media for research, in particular as tool for filtering the literature, twimpact factor, altmetrics...

1. Role of Social Media for Filtering
and Assessing Research
(altmetrics)
Gunther Eysenbach MD MPH FACMI
Twitter: @eysenbach
Editor/Publisher,
JMIR Publications @JMedInternetRes
www.jmir.org
Professor
Department of Health Policy, Management and
Evaluation, University of Toronto;
Senior Scientist,
Centre for Global eHealth Innovation,
Epublishing and Open Access Research Group
PI, Consumer Health Informatics & Public Health
Informatics Lab
Techna Institute
Co-Director, Communication & Knowledge
Translation
Director, Medicine 2.0 Conference Series

2. Medicine 2.0 Hawaii
Nov 13-14, 2014
Abstracts due Mar 12, 2014
Medicine 2.0 Europe
Oct 9-10, 2014
Abstracts due Mar 12, 2014
http://medicine20congress.com

3. What I will talk about
• Social Media as filtering tool
• Using these data to develop new metrics
(altmetrics, infodemiology metrics, “twimpact
factor”) and to filter research

4. Social Media Dissemination
Social Media
Analytics (big
data,altmetrics,
infodemiology)
Endusers
Scientists, Funders

5. Disclosure – Commercial Interests
• Founder, Publisher, CEO of JMIR Publications
• Co-founder, CSO of TrendMD (social-media
based filtering and recommendation widget of
the literature)

7. • First open access journal in health informatics/health services
research (1999)
• First electronic-only journal in health informatics/health services
research
• Among of the first OA journals in medicine (before BMC, PLoS etc),
cofounder of OASPA (OA Publisher Assoc)
• No commercial publisher involved, created by scientists for
scientists
• 6 new sister journals (JMIR Res Protoc, JMIR Mhealth, …)
• First ehealth journal publishing daily (since 2013)
• First to systematically collect and analyze altmetrics / social impact
metrics (tweets) (since 2008)
• Ranked #1 journal in its field (by impact factor [JIF: 3.8], number of
articles published, and social media impact)

8. JMIR is top-ranked by Impact Factor

9. …but citation-based metrics such as
the Impact Factor are imperfect
• Intransparent, proprietary
• Journal-level, not article-level (top journals
publish low-impact work as well)
• Not timely (3-year delay) / not real-time
• New journals not captured
• Very narrow definition of “impact”
– impact within scientific community
– What about “social impact”? Impact on endusers and the public?

10. The Filtering Role of Social Media
…complementing the filtering role of
journals

11. J Med Internet Res
www.jmir.org
Twitter:
@JMedInternetRes

12. “Top tweeted” articles

13. Proposed (and used) new metrics:
“Twimpact Factor” & “Twindex”

14. Proposed metrics
• “Twimpact Factor”: absolute number of
tweets within 7 days after publication
• “Twindex”: rank percentile of the article by
twimpact factor compared to a comparator
Eysenbach G. Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and
Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact
J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e123. URL: http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/

15. What is the correlation between social
media metrics and traditional metrics?
Eysenbach G. Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and
Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact
J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e123. URL: http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/

16. Correlation between tweetations (after 7
days) and citations (17-20 mo later)
Eysenbach G. Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and
Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact
J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e123. URL: http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/

17. “Twimpact Factor” predicts citations
• Highly tweeted articles were 11 times more
likely to be highly cited than less-tweeted
articles
• Top-cited articles can be predicted from toptweeted articles with 93% specificity and 75%
sensitivity WITHIN THE FIRST 3 DAYS OF
PUBLICATION. “
Eysenbach G. Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and
Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact
J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e123. URL: http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/

18. Timely: We can measure social [media]
impact within 3 days
Eysenbach G. Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and
Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact
J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e123. URL: http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/

19. Citation impact vs social [media]
impact
Eysenbach G. Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and
Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact
J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e123. URL: http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/

20. Main limitations/questions of the
“twimpact factor”
• Generalizable to other journals?
• How robust are these findings over time
(manipulations, changed behavior of scientists)

21. Btw: The “twimpact” paper was highly
tweeted…

22. … and in <2 yrs accumulated almost as many
citations as a similar 9 year-old BMJ paper

24. TrendMD
• Filtering and literature
alerts based on social media
activity
• Social ranking of articles
• Recommendations of
related articles based on
content similarity and social
media mentions (widget on
journal publisher site)

25. Conclusions
• New metrics are needed to filter what
researchers should pay attention to – social
media metrics can complement citation metrics
• Twimpact Factor and Twindex are new metrics
(“altmetrics”) which have been shown to be
correlated to citation metrics (Eysenbach 2011)
• Altmetrics.com, impact story, TrendMD are
emerging tools

26. Thank you!
Dr Gunther Eysenbach
@eysenbach, @medicine20, @JMedInternetRes
Email: geysenba at uhnres.utoronto.ca or @gmail.com,
My peer-reviewed Journal(s): http://www.jmir.org
My Blog: http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com
My Conference Series: http://www.medicine20congress.com
Join us at #med2 Medicine 2.0 in Hawaii, Nov 22-23 2014 !!
My Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/eysen
Funding
Change Foundation, Canadian Institutes for Health Research, NSERC, European Union, SSHRC