Is social media really impacting urogynecology?
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EDITORIAL
Is social media really impacting urogynecology? Luiz Gustavo Oliveira Brito 1
# The International Urogynecological Association 2020
Social media (SoMe) is increasingly being embraced by researchers in medicine. Medical journals have begun to understand the power of SoMe to interact with their readers online and to promote their articles [1]. Moreover, the medical community has been actively using SoMe to get connected and to exchange ideas. Academics can share their research with a broader audience [2]. In urogynecology, there has been a rapid increase in the usefulness of social media by health professionals [3]. Finally, patients are getting more connected with SoMe, especially women presenting to urogynecology practices; they have high internet use and a desire to learn about their diseases [4]. Among several SoMe platforms, Twitter is the preferred one because of its succinct input and rapid conversations (limited to 280 characters). If you decide to summarize any article or topic, you can create chains of connected tweets, called a “thread.” When a thread from a medical journal is discussing a specific topic, such as an article, this thread can be denominated as a “tweetorial,” and this gets a lot of attention from the readers because it is a summary of a study that can be shared (or “retweeted”) with everyone. These topics can be easily identified by hashtags (e.g., #urogynecology), and this process facilitates the access of information to anyone who is interested in this topic. Instagram is another SoMe platform, mainly visual, and can be used for interviews or to display visual abstracts; it can also stream “live transmission” for two people. Facebook also allows long messages for each post as well as video and live stream transmissions. Podcasts (usually audio conversations) are another internet-based medical resource, and their use and application in urogynecology were extensively discussed in a previous IUJ article by Chen and Melon [5].
* Luiz Gustavo Oliveira Brito [email protected] 1
Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, School of Medical Sciences, University of Campinas, Rua Alexander Fleming, 101 – Cidade Universitária, Campinas 13083-881, Brazil
Whether social media has an impact on article citations is under discussion, and many studies have been trying to establish a causal relation. One index that was created to measure social attention toward scientific research was the alternativelevel metrics (Altmetrics), a weighted composite score that includes SoMe platforms, Wikipedia, Mendeley, policy documents, and traditional media sharing (blogs, news) [6]. Another format to analyze SoMe's impact is when we compare a researcher’s impact on SoMe to their number of citations. The Kardashian index is one of these measures and consists of plotting the number of Twitter followers against the number of citations an individual has [7]. A study published by Chandrasekar et al. [8] with academic urologists and programs in North America has shown that physicians with higher H-indices and cit
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