{"doi":"10.2196/28859","title":"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<.001), indicating a weak positive correlation between these two metrics. A total of 715 (78%) of 917 stakeholders had a Scopus h-index available. The median HSG score for these profiles was 57.6 (IQR 46.4), and the median h-index was 7 (IQR 16). For the 715 subjects with the HSG score and Scopus h-index available, ρ was 0.2173 (P<.001), also indicating a weak positive correlation. CONCLUSIONS: We found a weak positive correlation between a novel author-level complementary metric and the h-index. More than a chiasm between traditional citation metrics and novel social media-based metrics, our findings point toward a bridge between the two domains.","journal":"Journal of Medical Internet Research","year":2021,"id":178454,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":19,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9587,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":724184,"name":"Graciela Maldonado","orcid":"0000-0002-3339-3256","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":614193,"name":"Tara Brigham","orcid":"0000-0002-2175-4819","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":495411,"name":"Aidan F. Mullan","orcid":"0000-0001-8076-6935","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":724185,"name":"Audun Utengen","orcid":"0000-0003-4851-269X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":245109,"name":"Daniel Cabrera","orcid":"0000-0002-5891-0459","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":314134,"name":"Lucas Oliveira J. e Silva","orcid":"0000-0001-5388-9163","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":28,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:47:40.592580Z","pmid":"34057413","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}