The Social Media Editor at Medical Journals: Responsibilities, Goals, Barriers, and Facilitators

Melany N. Lopez · Teresa M. Chan · Brent Thoma · Vineet M. Arora · Nathan Seth Trueger

66 citations0/0 files storedAcademic Medicine

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Social Media in Health Education Publishing and Scholarly Communication Academic Publishing and Open Access

Abstract

PURPOSE: To determine the responsibilities of journal social media editors (SMEs) and describe their goals and barriers and facilitators to their position. METHOD: The authors identified SMEs using an informal listserv and snowball sampling. Participants were interviewed (June-July 2016) about their position, including responsibilities; goals; barriers and facilitators; and attitudes and perceptions about the position. Themes were identified through a thematic analysis and consensus-building approach. Descriptive data, including audience metrics and 2016 impact factors, were collected. RESULTS: Thirty SMEs were invited; 24 were interviewed (19 by phone and 5 via e-mail). SMEs generally had a track record in the social media community before being invited to be SME; many had preexisting roles at their journal. Responsibilities varied considerably; some SMEs also served as decision editors. Many SMEs personally managed journal accounts, and many had support from nonphysician journal staff. Consistently, SMEs focused on improving reader engagement by disseminating new journal publications on social media. The authors identified goals, resources, and sustainability as primary themes of SMEs' perspectives on their positions. Editorial leadership support was identified as a key facilitator in their position at the journal. Challenges to sustainability included a lack of tangible resources and uncertainty surrounding, or a lack of, academic credit for social media activities. CONCLUSIONS: Many of the participating SMEs pioneered the use of social media as a platform for knowledge dissemination at their journals. While editorial boards were qualitatively supportive, SMEs were challenged by limited resources and lack of academic credit for social media work.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 66 citations exist upstream.

References

2014Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research 2011Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact 2012Reviewing social media use by clinicians: Table 1 2017Visual Abstracts to Disseminate Research on Social Media 2015The Altmetric Score: A New Measure for Article-Level Dissemination and Impact 2017More Than Likes and Tweets: Creating Social Media Portfolios for Academic Promotion and Tenure 2017The impact of social media promotion with infographics and podcasts on research dissemination and readership 2017Social Media Scholarship and Alternative Metrics for Academic Promotion and Tenure

Cited by

2020Good practices in harnessing social media for scholarly discourse, knowledge translation, and education 2020Quality Appraisal and Assurance Techniques for Free Open Access Medical Education (FOAM) Resources: A Rapid Review 2020To Tweet or Not to Tweet, That Is the Question 2021Article-Level Metrics 2017Impact of a Physician-Led Social Media Sharing Program on a Medical Journal’s Web Traffic

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.