Does Reader Engagement with Neurosurgery Journal Websites Correlate with the Number of Citations Received by Articles?

Abstract

Background: Medicine has begun adapting to new information-sharing paradigms in the hyper-connected social media era. In this milieu, the role of journal websites in the dissemination of clinical and research information needs to be reevaluated. Objective: We sought to explore whether reader engagement with neurosurgical journal websites, reflected by the number of article views and downloads, correlated with the eventual number of citations received by the articles. Methods: The websites of all Medline indexed neurosurgical journals were screened to identify those that provided information regarding the number of abstract and full text views and downloads. Articles published in these journals between July 2010 and June 2011 were included in this analysis. Various article attributes were identified and the number of citations per article was obtained from Google Scholar. The impact factors of the selected journals for the year 2010 were obtained from the Journal Citation Reports. Results: Twenty-two journals that had published 2527 articles were finally included in this analysis. The number of abstract views, full-text views, and downloads all correlated strongly with the journal impact factors in 2010 as well as the eventual citations per article. The number of article downloads independently predicted the citations per article on multivariate analysis. Neurology India had significantly higher article views and downloads but lower citations per article than the other journals. Conclusions: Readers were found to engage significantly with neurosurgical journal websites and therefore, open access to articles would lead to increased visibility of articles, resulting in higher citation rates.