Gauging the Social Media Attention of COVID-19 Articles
Abstract
Introduction: Altmetrics or alternative metrics has become a novel technique for measuring the impact of the research. It considers social web as a major source of data and measures how a piece of literature has discussed in various social platforms in terms of shares, mentions, bookmarks, tweets, saves, etc. Rather than measuring the scientific impact, it gauges the social impact of the research which can not be done by the conventional way which primarily consisted of counting the citations bagged by an article.
Importance: The deadly pandemic COVID-19 has travelled in social media very fast and subsequently fake information has become a headache. The main impetus for conducting the present study is to know how well articles on COVID-19 have propagated and discussed in social platforms since the disease is unknown to many and social media has become a major carrier of fake information which tempted many to make wrong decisions. We decided to conduct the present study to know how well COVID-19 articles are diffused in social platforms and to find out the hot platform for the discussion. The result of the study can be used for taking proper decisions regarding the management of various social platforms amid this kind of epizootic pandemic.
Objectives: The main objective of the study is to measure the social media attention/ altmetrics of COVID-19 articles.
Methodology: The data for the study would be collected from Dimension database which is a dedicated database for altmetric studies. A search by using the keyword “COVID-19” would be carried out in the database to retrieve articles on the pandemic as on 01 Dec 2020. The articles would be sorted according to the number of social media attention received from highest to lowest. A total of 25 articles with the highest social media attention would be selected and their major metrics from Facebook, Twitter, Mendeley, Blogs, News outlets would be measured and tabled using Excel for the subsequent analysis. The data would be subjected to correlation to know the associations between citations and altmetric attention score in the case of COVID-19 articles.
How to cite this article:
Saranya R, Parmar M. Gauging the Social Media Attention of COVID-19 Articles. J Adv Res Lib Inform Sci 2021; 8(1): 25-30.
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