WeChat uptake of Chinese scholarly journals: an analysis of CSSCI-indexed journals

TL;DR

This study analyzes the adoption and impact of WeChat by Chinese CSSCI-indexed scholarly journals, revealing that most journals use WeChat and that its presence slightly correlates with higher citation impact, highlighting the differentiated roles of social media and bibliometric indicators.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of WeChat usage among Chinese scholarly journals and explores its relationship with traditional bibliometric measures.

Findings

65.3% of CSSCI journals have WeChat accounts

WeChat activity is weakly correlated with bibliometric indicators

Journals with WeChat accounts tend to have higher citation impact

Abstract

The study of how science is discussed and how scholarly actors interact on social media has increasingly become popular in the field of scientometrics in recent years. While most prior studies focused on research outputs discussed on global platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook, the presence of scholarly journals on local platforms was seldom studied, especially in the Chinese social media context. To fill this gap, this study investigates the uptake of WeChat (a Chinese social network app) by the Chinese scholarly journals indexed by the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI). The results show that 65.3% of CSSCI-indexed journals have created WeChat public accounts and posted over 193 thousand WeChat posts in total. At the journal level, bibliometric indicators (e.g., citations, downloads, and journal impact factors) and WeChat indicators (e.g., clicks, likes, replies, and recommendations) are weakly correlated with each other, reinforcing the idea of fundamentally differentiated dimensions of indicators between bibliometrics and social media metrics. Results also show that journals with WeChat public accounts slightly outperform those without WeChat public accounts in terms of citation impact, suggesting that the WeChat presence of scientific journals is mostly positively associated with their citation impact.