The Role of Social Media in the Journals and the Effectiveness of Journals on Social Media: A Comparative Study of Reputable Journals based on OECD Classification

The purpose of the paper is to study the role of social media in journals and the impact of journals on social media in the six subject areas of OECD.

This applied research was conducted in 2023 with scientometric indicators and approaches. The research population includes 380 titles from world journals and 41 Iranian journals, which have quartile (Q) and belong to one of the six subject areas of OECD. The data were collected using Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC), InCite, and altmetrics, which were analyzed using Access, Excel, SPSS, and Data wrapper.

The findings showed that medical and natural sciences journals have a higher rank regarding the variety of social media and the frequency of social citations. Twitter, patents, and news agencies are the most important social media. In world journals, there is a strong correlation between the number of received citations and the number of social citations of natural sciences, engineering, medical sciences, agricultural sciences, and humanities journals, and a moderate correlation with social science journals. In Iranian journals, there was a strong correlation between the number of standard and social citations of Iranian journals in engineering and medical sciences. The variety of media used in Iranian journals is lower than that of world journals, and the gap between the social citations of Iranian journals and the world is vast. The United States and Great Britain users are the most social citers on Twitter and Facebook.

The results highlight the necessity of familiarizing the country's researchers and research policymakers with the advantage of social media in promoting and highlighting research outputs and improving the country's scientific status in the long term.