Abstract
The study of how science is discussed and how scholarly actors interact on social media has increasingly become popular in the field of scientometrics in recent years. While most prior studies focused on research outputs discussed on global platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook, the presence of scholarly journals on local platforms was seldom studied, especially in the Chinese social media context. To fill this gap, this study investigates the uptake of WeChat (a Chinese social network app) by the Chinese scholarly journals indexed by the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI). The results show that 65.3% of CSSCI-indexed journals have created WeChat public accounts and posted over 193 thousand WeChat posts in total. At the journal level, bibliometric indicators (e.g., citations, downloads, and journal impact factors) and WeChat indicators (e.g., clicks, likes, replies, and recommendations) are weakly correlated with each other, reinforcing the idea of fundamentally differentiated dimensions of indicators between bibliometrics and social media metrics. Results also show that journals with WeChat public accounts slightly outperform those without WeChat public accounts in terms of citation impact, suggesting that the WeChat presence of scientific journals is mostly positively associated with their citation impact.
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Notes
WeChat: active users worldwide. https://www.statista.com/statistics/255778/number-of-active-wechat-messenger-accounts/ (Accessed August 01, 2021).
WeChat Statistics: https://99firms.com/blog/wechat-statistics/ (Accessed August 01, 2021).
The ranking list of WeChat Public Accounts among 500 global scholarly journals (in Chinese): https://www.linkresearcher.com/information/fa60d09a-0853-4796-9084-e4ec0b42b1d1 (Accessed August 01, 2021).
The global ranking of academic journals’ impact on WeChat announced:https://cactusglobal.com/press/the-global-ranking-of-academic-journals-impact-on-wechat-announced/ (Accessed August 01, 2021).
Project 985 is a boosting project to promote the Chinese higher education system as called for by former President Jiang Zemin at the 100th anniversary of Peking University on May 4, 1998. The objective is to develop, in cooperation with local government, several top universities to be world-leading.
Both “combined IF”—combined impact factor—and “comprehensive IF”—comprehensive impact factor—are denominations of the indicators used by CNKI.
http://www.cdgdc.edu.cn/xwyyjsjyxx/sy/glmd/264462.shtml (In Chinese, accessed August 01, 2021).
We argue that Facebook can be seen as the western social media platform conceptually closer to WeChat. In any case, Zheng et al. (2019) also analyzed the Twitter presence of A&HCI and SSCI-indexed journals, finding only 9% and 7.7% of the journals with Twitter accounts, both numbers clearly below the values found in our study.
There are several ways WeChat users can find and follow WeChat official accounts. The most common way of acquiring new followers on WeChat is through WeChat Moments (the WeChat equivalent of the Facebook timeline). Upon clicking on the article, users can access the account page by clicking the name of the account at the top of the article.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2021YFF0900400). Rodrigo Costas is partially funded by the South African DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (SciSTIP). The paper is a substantially extended version of a conference poster paper accepted at the 18th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI 2021), celebrated the 12-15 July 2021 (https://issi2021.org/).
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One of the authors (Rodrigo Costas) is a member of the Distinguished Reviewers Board of the journal Scientometrics.
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Cong, T., Fang, Z. & Costas, R. WeChat uptake of chinese scholarly journals: an analysis of CSSCI-indexed journals. Scientometrics 127, 7091–7110 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04347-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04347-0