Social Media Usage by Orthopaedic Sports Medicine Journals: An Analysis of Impactful Practices

Objective Social media continues to grow in popularity and its utility as a tool for dispersing information has gained attention in healthcare. There is currently a paucity of literature evaluating the use of social media in orthopaedic surgery. Even less studied is the relationship of orthopaedic sports medicine journals’ traditional bibliometrics such as impact factor (IF) with newer social media metrics such as the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS). The purpose of the present study is to examine correlations between the traditional bibliometric score of impact factor (IF) with alternative metrics like AAS. Methods The social media engagement and attention of seven top orthopaedic sports medicine journals were collected. Attention was measured using two calculated scoring systems, SparkToro’s SparkScore and AAS, and engagement was measured by the number of followers, likes, and posts for each account. Yearly IFs were identified and compared to correlate bibliometric factors with social media engagement and attention. Results All seven (100%) journals had both Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts at the time of data collection (November 2021), and four of the seven journals (57%) had Instagram accounts. There was no correlation between journal IF or Instagram followers and average AAS; however, there was marginal correlation between average AAS and number of Twitter followers (p < 0.058) and number of Facebook followers (p < 0.076). Conclusion Based on the results of this study, traditional social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are the most used platforms by orthopaedic sports medicine journals, with newer applications such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok having minimal to no engagement. The marginal correlation between markers of attention and number of both Twitter and Facebook followers suggests that increasing follower counts in these applications may be beneficial to increasing the reach of orthopaedic sports medicine journals.