Social media uptake of scientific journals: A comparison between X and WeChat

2025-07-22

AI Summary

This study investigates how regional sociotechnical contexts shape scientific communication patterns by comparing the adoption of international (X, formerly Twitter) and domestic (WeChat) social media platforms by scholarly journals. Method: A comprehensive platform account census, user engagement analysis, and correlation testing between social media metrics and bibliometric indicators were conducted, leveraging large-scale web scraping and statistical analysis. Contribution/Results: We find that 84.4% of CSCD-indexed Chinese journals maintain official WeChat accounts, whereas only 22.7% of SCIE-indexed journals operate X accounts. Engagement on both platforms is predominantly low-intensity (e.g., likes/shares rather than substantive discussion), and social media impact exhibits weak correlations with traditional citation-based metrics. This study provides the first systematic empirical evidence of structural divergence in scholarly communication across global and localized platforms, underscoring the critical role of regionally embedded infrastructures. It advocates integrating context-sensitive, platform-specific social media indicators into scientific impact assessment frameworks to support pluralistic, ecologically valid evaluation of science communication.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Interdisciplinary science discovery with web data mining
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Social recommender systems and personalization for the social Web

Abstract

This study examines the social media uptake of scientific journals on two different platforms - X and WeChat - by comparing the adoption of X among journals indexed in the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) with the adoption of WeChat among journals indexed in the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD). The findings reveal substantial differences in platform adoption and user engagement, shaped by local contexts. While only 22.7% of SCIE journals maintain an X account, 84.4% of CSCD journals have a WeChat official account. Journals in Life Sciences & Biomedicine lead in uptake on both platforms, whereas those in Technology and Physical Sciences show high WeChat uptake but comparatively lower presence on X. User engagement on both platforms is dominated by low-effort interactions rather than more conversational behaviors. Correlation analyses indicate weak-to-moderate relationships between bibliometric indicators and social media metrics, confirming that online engagement reflects a distinct dimension of journal impact, whether on an international or a local platform. These findings underscore the need for broader social media metric frameworks that incorporate locally dominant platforms, thereby offering a more comprehensive understanding of science communication practices across diverse social media and contexts.

Problem

• Compare social media uptake of journals on X and WeChat
• Analyze platform adoption differences in SCIE and CSCD journals
• Examine weak correlation between bibliometrics and social metrics

Innovation

• Compares X and WeChat journal adoption rates
• Analyzes engagement differences by platform context
• Links bibliometrics to social media metrics weakly