Seeing Is Believing: The Effect of Graphical Abstracts on Citations and Social Media Exposure in Gastroenterology & Hepatology Journals

BACKGROUND: Graphical abstracts (GAs) have recently been included as an essential element in various journals, including those in the field of Gastroenterology & Hepatology. However, there has been no study on the effect of GAs on the impact factor (IF) of journals, and the citation index or social media exposure of individual articles. METHODS: We investigated the presence of GAs, total citations and social media exposure of full-length original articles in the top ten journals of gastroenterology and hepatology for three years (2019–2021). Citations and social media exposure were evaluated with the Web of Science citation index, Altmetric Attention score, Dimension recorded citation count, and PlumX index. RESULTS: A total of 4,205 articles from ten journals were evaluated for three years. First, journals that have adopted GAs demonstrated significantly higher IF increases for the past three years than those of journals without GAs. The longer GAs have been utilized in a journal, the higher IFs the journal had. Secondly, individual articles with GAs had significantly higher Web of Science citation counts (median 14 vs. 12), more social media exposure (median 23 vs. 5) and more Altmetric.com tweet counts (median 15 vs. 7) than those of articles without GAs. In multiple regression analysis, the inclusion of GAs was particularly effective in increasing the number of Web of Science citations (β = 14.1, SE = 1.9, P < 0.001) and social media exposure (β = 13.3, SE = 6.1, P = 0.030) after adjusting for journal IFs and topics. CONCLUSION: GAs are effective in increasing IFs of journals in the field of gastroenterology and hepatology, as well as increasing citations and social media exposure of individual articles.