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.
翻译:近些年来,关于科学如何讨论以及学术行为者如何在社交媒体上互动的研究在科学计量学领域越来越受欢迎。虽然大多数先前研究的重点是全球平台,如推特或Facebook上讨论的研究产出,但很少研究地方平台上存在的学术期刊,特别是在中国社交媒体背景下。为填补这一空白,本研究调查了中国学术期刊采用WeChat(中国社交网络应用软件)的情况,中国社会科学引用指数(CSMI)为该指数索引索引的中国学术期刊采用WeChat(中国社交网络应用软件)的情况。结果显示,CSSCI指数杂志65.3%创建了WeChat公共账户,并张贴了超过193,000个WeChat文章。在期刊层面,双光度指标(例如引用、下载和期刊影响因素)和WeChat指标(例如点击、类似、答复和建议)与其他指标的关联性不强,从而强化了两面计量与社会媒体指标之间根本差异的理念。结果还显示,WeCat公共账户的期刊略高于那些与Wehat杂志具有积极影响的数据。