Social media usage to share information in communication journals: An analysis of social media activity and article citations

Abstract

Social media has surrounded every area of life, and social media platforms have become indispensable for today’s communication. Many journals use social media actively to promote and disseminate new articles. Its use to share the articles contributes many benefits, such as reaching more people and spreading information faster. However, there is no consensus in the studies that to evaluate between tweeted and non-tweeted papers regarding their citation numbers. Therefore, it was aimed to show the effect of social media on the citations of articles in the top ten communication-based journals. For this purpose, this work evaluated original articles published in the top 10 communication journals in 2018. The top 10 communication-based journals were chosen based on SCImago Journal & Country Rank (cited in 2019). Afterward, it was recorded the traditional citation numbers (Google Scholar and Thompson-Reuters Web of Science) and social media exposure of the articles in January 2021 (nearly three years after the articles’ publication date). It was assumed that this period would allow the impact of the published articles (the citations and Twitter mentions) to be fully observed. Based on this assessment, a positive correlation between exposure to social media and article citations was observed in this study.