Citation indices for social media articles in urology

To evaluate the impact of publications on urological participation in social media (SoMe) by virtue of citations in the urological and non-urological literature.

On 15 March 2016, a PubMed search was undertaken using the names of the major SoMe platforms in current use and associated with the field of urology. The search term 'urolog*' was used to specifically capture articles that could be associated with 'urology', 'urologist' or 'urological'. Exclusion criteria for analysis included non-English language articles, articles published for the first time online in any form after 1 March 2015, articles irrelevant to the topic of SoMe, and letters of correspondence. Included articles were then searched in Google Scholar and citations analysed to determine if citations were from the urological literature or non-urological literature. Citations from non-urological journals were considered to be as such even if authored by urologists and on the subject of urology and SoMe.

Prior to exclusions as defined in the methods, our PubMed search yielded 232 articles of which 17 were non-English language and 66 had been published after 1 March 2015. Allowing for 12 months after the most recent articles were published, we found that the mean number of total citations in any journal was 20.8. There were more citations in journals not specific to urology, with 8.3 citations in urological journals, compared to 12.6 citations in non-urological journals.

Urological SoMe journal articles are highly cited, particularly in the non-urological literature. It is likely that the magnitude of citations has positively contributed to the impact factors of the almost all journals publishing these manuscripts.