Evaluating scholars’ impact and influence: Cross-sectional study of the correlation between a novel social media–based score and an author-level citation metric

Abstract

Background: The development of an author-level complementary metric could play a role in the process of academic promotion through objective evaluation of scholars’ influence and impact. Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the correlation between the Healthcare Social Graph (HSG) score, a novel social media influence and impact metric, and the h-index, a traditional author-level metric. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study of health care stakeholders with a social media presence randomly sampled from the Symplur database in May 2020. We performed stratified random sampling to obtain a representative sample with all strata of HSG scores. We manually queried the h-index in two reference-based databases (Scopus and Google Scholar). Continuous features (HSG score and h-index) from the included profiles were summarized as the median and IQR. We calculated the Spearman correlation coefficients (ρ) to evaluate the correlation between the HSG scores and h-indexes obtained from Google Scholar and Scopus. Results: A total of 286 (31.2%) of the 917 stakeholders had a Google Scholar h-index available. The median HSG score for these profiles was 61.1 (IQR 48.2), and the median h-index was 14.5 (IQR 26.0). For the 286 subjects with the HSG score and Google Scholar h-index available, the Spearman correlation coefficient ρ was 0.1979 (P