06 May 2013

The impact of social media

As readers of Information Research may have noticed, I have started to use links to Facebook, Twitter and various bookmark sharing services at the bottom of each paper in the journal. The service, from AddThis.com, provides information on the number of clicks these links receive and the resulting 'clicks-back' to the relevant paper. The number of resulting hits, divided by the original clicks provides a measure of what they call "viral lift", i.e., the additional hits resulting from the social media links. This provides some kind of measure of the 'popularity' of a paper, which the usual citation indexes cannot. A citation can mean many things: agreement with the propositions in a paper, refutation of those propositions, mere token acknowledgement of its place in the literature, or whatever. A social media link presumably means: "I've read this and you might find it interesting". What one cannot know, of course, is how many of those referred to a paper from a Facebook or Twitter link would have found the paper without such help. However, over time, we may be able to contrast the hits on the site before the introduction of this feature with the situation afterwards.


The results, since the publication of volume 18 number 1, on the 15th March 2013, for the top ten listed items are as follows:

Factores para la adopción de linked data e...
219 Clicks 30 Shares 730% Viral Lift

Visitors and residents: what motivates engagement wi...
169 Clicks 57 Shares 296% Viral Lift

Multi-dimensional analysis of dynamic human informat...
136 Clicks 16 Shares 850% Viral Lift

In Web search we trust? Articulation of the cognitiv...
125 Clicks 9 Shares 1,389% Viral Lift

The nature and constitution of informal carers' info...
71 Clicks 9 Shares 789% Viral Lift

Big-data in cloud computing: a taxonomy of risks
39 Clicks 23 Shares 170% Viral Lift

Exploring design-fits for the strategic alignment of...
29 Clicks 15 Shares 193% Viral Lift

Search behaviour in electronic document and records...
23 Clicks 7 Shares 329% Viral Lift

Managing collaborative information sharing: bridging...
17 Clicks 13 Shares 131% Viral Lift

Workplace information practices among human resource...
16 Clicks 9 Shares 178% Viral Lift

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