Impact of a Digital Strategy Team in an Academic Stroke Journal: 1 Year in Review

The social media platform Twitter has increasingly been leveraged to disseminate clinical and academic content, including scientific research. Launched in November 2021 as an exclusively online open access journal, the Stroke: Vascular and Interventional Neurology journal was not indexed on PubMed for its first year of publication. We aimed to evaluate the impact of the journal's Twitter presence by tracking social media posts and article metrics over the first year since the journal's inception.

Measures of Twitter influence from the @SVINJournal account were associated with the academic impact of articles published in the associated journal during the first 13 months of the journal's publication record. Descriptive statistics and the Pearson correlation coefficient were used to quantify measures of association, with the primary outcome being unique article requests (downloads).

There were 174 unique articles published during the study period, with 367 unique tweets. Articles referenced in tweets from @SVINJournal had nearly twice as many requests as articles without tweets (median 967 [interquartile range, 683-1357] versus 497 [interquartile range, 331-711]; P<0.01), with a mild correlation between number of tweets and article requests when @SVINJournal cited the article in tweets (r=0.20; P=0.009). There was a fair correlation between article request counts and any Twitter mentions (r=0.41; P<0.001), and a poor correlation between article requests and altmetric score (r=0.15; P=0.04). There was a small correlation between the number of citations and number of tweets from @SVINJournal (r=0.21; P=0.006).

There was a statistically significant, but small, association between tweets and article requests as well as citations. Highly tweeted articles had a higher number of citations. In the absence of PubMed indexing and print distribution, social media platforms can have an impact in promoting peer-reviewed content and may increase content access and citations.