Metadata Requirements for Repositories in Health Informatics Research: Evidence from the Analysis of Social Media Citations

Abstract

Social media have transformed the way modern science is communicated. Although several studies have been focused on the use of social media for the dissemination of scientific knowledge and the measurement of the impact of academic output, we know very little about how academics cite social media in their publications. In order to address this gap, a content analysis was performed on a sample of 629 journal articles in medical informatics. The findings showed the presence of 109 citations to social media resources, the majority of which were blogs and wikis. Social media citations were used more frequently to support the literature review section of articles. However, a fair amount of citations was used in order to document various aspects of the methodology section, such as the data collection and analysis process. The paper concludes with the implications of these findings for metadata design for bibliographic databases (like PubMed and Medline).