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Academic impact evaluation of Wechat in view of social media perspective

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Abstract

Social media platform makes more and more influence on academic communication with the development of web 2.0 + technology. Wechat (WeiXin in Chinese) is one of the social media tools based on social media platform to publicly communicate about research developments and finds for academics. The development of Wechat not only enriches the development of social media tools but also provides a new perspective and method for the evaluation of academic influence. The traditional metrics are not necessarily immediate feedback or reproducible, which are based on citation methods of evaluating and filtering articles. Wechat as one of the popular social media tools, which can provide possibility to make impact evaluation as a novel and promising approach to supplement the traditional citation metrics. Wechat not only can support the social influence for non-academic findings, but also provide academic impact of scholarships. The proposed Wechat index may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings with public in real time. In short, Wechat is greatly supplement the offline methods of research dissemination and networking.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Shen yang from gsdata.cn for help and support in providing the data. This work is supported by National Social Science Foundation in China (Grant No. 16BTQ055). Finally, we thank Wolfgang Glänzel for comments and two anonymous referees.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Chinese Science Evaluation, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Rongying Zhao & Mingkun Wei

  2. School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Rongying Zhao & Mingkun Wei

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  1. Rongying Zhao
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  2. Mingkun Wei
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Correspondence to Mingkun Wei.

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Zhao, R., Wei, M. Academic impact evaluation of Wechat in view of social media perspective. Scientometrics 112, 1777–1791 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2439-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2439-2

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