Reply to the Letter “Further Insights on the Correlation between Reader Engagement and Article Citations in Neurosurgery Journals”

We thank the authors for their in depth analysis of our paper. However, their message is unclear and we have several points to make in response to their letter – The author suggests that since it is 2024, one should not ignore the role of social media in an otherwise rigorous analysis. While that may indeed be true, it should be noted that when a paper is shared on a social media platform, (not necessarily a research social media platform - ResearchGate, Mendeley), the shared link most often redirects to the journal website. Sharing direct pdf files is not common practice since one would require explicit permission from the journal to do so in most, if not all cases. Journals (through publishers) already use a number of ways to identify how many times an article has been viewed. They collect data from both traditional (web analytics, DOIs) as well as alternative (altmetrics, PlumX) sources and therefore constitute the best possible source to collate the number of views for a paper.[1-3] The scope of our work was not to establish the several ways to improve article viewership but rather to examine if views correlated with citations at all, regardless of the source. This was the very narrow outcome that we were interested in. Analysis of engagement on social media would be more appropriate in the context of evaluating alternative metrics against the gold standard of traditional metrics. In a previous work, we evaluated just this and we did indeed observe a robust correlation between the traditional metrics and alternative metrics.[4] Open access journals were not included in our analysis since citation data around our period of interest (2010-2011) were not available for OA journals, owing to the fact that purely open access journals in neurosurgery are a relatively recent phenomenon. We chose this period since adequate time would have passed since publication to accrue citations. The DOAJ lists 49 journals when the term “neurosurgery” is queried. If one were to filter them based on the date added, one would find only two journals to be active before 2010. One is the journal Case Reports in Neurology (added 2009) and the other International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology (added 2008).[5] Although the scope of these journals covers neurosurgical articles, they are by no means representative of the open access publishing landscape in neurosurgery. Most neurosurgery journals we analysed have a hybrid model, incorporating free access articles along with pay-per-view ones. Therefore establishing the number of downloads as a predictor of citations in this context, lends support to the impact of open access articles in the dissemination of science. While we appreciate the interest of the authors in our paper, we aver that the narrow focus we had in our analysis was the result of carefully crafted logic and reiterate the validity of the results presented in the paper.