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A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Views: A Triple Crossover Trial of Visual Abstracts to Examine Their Impact on Research Dissemination
BACKGROUND: A visual abstract is a graphic summary of a research article’s question, methods, and major findings. Although they have a number of uses, visual abstracts are chiefly used to promote research articles on social media. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to determine if the use of visual abstrac...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
JMIR Publications
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7748957/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33275112 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/22327 |
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author | Oska, Sandra Lerma, Edgar Topf, Joel |
author_facet | Oska, Sandra Lerma, Edgar Topf, Joel |
author_sort | Oska, Sandra |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: A visual abstract is a graphic summary of a research article’s question, methods, and major findings. Although they have a number of uses, visual abstracts are chiefly used to promote research articles on social media. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to determine if the use of visual abstracts increases the visibility of nephrology research shared on Twitter. METHODS: A prospective case-control crossover study was conducted using 40 research articles published in the American Journal of Nephrology (AJN). Each article was shared by the AJN Twitter account in 3 formats: (1) the article citation, (2) the citation with a key figure from the article, and (3) the citation with a visual abstract. Tweets were spaced 2 weeks apart to allow washout of the previous tweet, and the order of the tweets was randomized. Dissemination was measured via retweets, views, number of link clicks, and Altmetric scores. RESULTS: Tweets that contained a visual abstract had more than twice as many views as citation-only tweets (1351, SD 1053 vs 639, SD 343) and nearly twice as many views as key figure tweets (1351, SD 1053 vs 732, SD 464). Visual abstract tweets had 5 times the engagements of citation-only tweets and more than 3.5 times the engagements of key figure tweets. Visual abstract tweets were also associated with greater increases in Altmetric scores as compared to citation-only tweets (2.20 vs 1.05). CONCLUSIONS: The use of visual abstracts increased visibility of research articles on Twitter, resulting in a greater number of views, engagements, and retweets. Visual abstracts were also associated with increased Altmetric scores as compared to citation-only tweets. These findings support the broader use of visual abstracts in the scientific community. Journals should consider visual abstracts as valuable tools for research dissemination. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7748957 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | JMIR Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-77489572020-12-30 A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Views: A Triple Crossover Trial of Visual Abstracts to Examine Their Impact on Research Dissemination Oska, Sandra Lerma, Edgar Topf, Joel J Med Internet Res Original Paper BACKGROUND: A visual abstract is a graphic summary of a research article’s question, methods, and major findings. Although they have a number of uses, visual abstracts are chiefly used to promote research articles on social media. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to determine if the use of visual abstracts increases the visibility of nephrology research shared on Twitter. METHODS: A prospective case-control crossover study was conducted using 40 research articles published in the American Journal of Nephrology (AJN). Each article was shared by the AJN Twitter account in 3 formats: (1) the article citation, (2) the citation with a key figure from the article, and (3) the citation with a visual abstract. Tweets were spaced 2 weeks apart to allow washout of the previous tweet, and the order of the tweets was randomized. Dissemination was measured via retweets, views, number of link clicks, and Altmetric scores. RESULTS: Tweets that contained a visual abstract had more than twice as many views as citation-only tweets (1351, SD 1053 vs 639, SD 343) and nearly twice as many views as key figure tweets (1351, SD 1053 vs 732, SD 464). Visual abstract tweets had 5 times the engagements of citation-only tweets and more than 3.5 times the engagements of key figure tweets. Visual abstract tweets were also associated with greater increases in Altmetric scores as compared to citation-only tweets (2.20 vs 1.05). CONCLUSIONS: The use of visual abstracts increased visibility of research articles on Twitter, resulting in a greater number of views, engagements, and retweets. Visual abstracts were also associated with increased Altmetric scores as compared to citation-only tweets. These findings support the broader use of visual abstracts in the scientific community. Journals should consider visual abstracts as valuable tools for research dissemination. JMIR Publications 2020-12-04 /pmc/articles/PMC7748957/ /pubmed/33275112 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/22327 Text en ©Sandra Oska, Edgar Lerma, Joel Topf. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 04.12.2020. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included. |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Oska, Sandra Lerma, Edgar Topf, Joel A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Views: A Triple Crossover Trial of Visual Abstracts to Examine Their Impact on Research Dissemination |
title | A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Views: A Triple Crossover Trial of Visual Abstracts to Examine Their Impact on Research Dissemination |
title_full | A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Views: A Triple Crossover Trial of Visual Abstracts to Examine Their Impact on Research Dissemination |
title_fullStr | A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Views: A Triple Crossover Trial of Visual Abstracts to Examine Their Impact on Research Dissemination |
title_full_unstemmed | A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Views: A Triple Crossover Trial of Visual Abstracts to Examine Their Impact on Research Dissemination |
title_short | A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Views: A Triple Crossover Trial of Visual Abstracts to Examine Their Impact on Research Dissemination |
title_sort | picture is worth a thousand views: a triple crossover trial of visual abstracts to examine their impact on research dissemination |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7748957/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33275112 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/22327 |
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