The Use of Social Media as Bibliographic Citations in Open Access Education Journals

There has been a recent increase in the use of social media platforms (SMPs), as well as a large increase in scientific journals and academic article publications. We need to study if and how much academics, scholars and researchers trust SMPs as sources, i.e., citations, for writing their research articles. The purpose of this research is to explore the relationship between SMPs and bibliographic article citations for ten years between 2010 and 2019, with 31 December marking the official identification of COVID-19, a milestone that affected the whole world, including academic publishing. By using a citation retrieval tool written in Java, the citations referring to the URLs of 6432 articles from 14 Q1 open access education journals ranked by the SCImago platform were extracted. The retrieved URLs were stored in a relational database, preprocessed and cleaned, and analyzed using SQL queries to identify and quantify citations originating from SMPs. The findings showed that there were 112 instances, which corresponds to 1.8% of the articles, of an SMP post being used as a citation. Out of the 17 SMPs checked, eight were used, with the most popular being YouTube, having a percentage of 68% of the aforementioned 112 citations, followed by Twitter (now X) with approximately 13.5% and then by Facebook with around 7%. Most of these in-text citations were found at the Introduction and the Design/Methodology sections of the papers. Other important findings of this study were that about 2% of the URL citations referred to blogs and wikis and that one in 100 articles used Wikipedia in the bibliography. Also, for a 26-year period from 1999 to 2024, it was observed that the number of journals increased by 82.8%, while the number of open access journals showed an impressive 552.14% increase. The findings of this study could lead to changes in the metadata design of bibliographic databases, like the way of searching them, and to a review of the life cycle duration of sustainable access to the content of the cited SMPs.