• Michelle Lin, Mina Phipps, Teresa M Chan, Brent Thoma, Christopher J Nash, Yusuf Yilmaz, David Chen, Shuhan He, and Michael A Gisondi.
• Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA. Electronic address: michelle.lin@ucsf.edu.
• Ann Emerg Med. 2023 Jul 1; 82 (1): 556555-65.

Study ObjectiveGiven the popularity of educational blogs and podcasts in medicine, learners and educators need tools to identify trusted and impactful sites. The Social Media Index was a multi-sourced formula to rank the effect of emergency medicine and critical care blogs. In 2022, a key data point for the Social Media Index became unavailable. This bibliometric study aimed to develop a new measure, the Digital Impact Factor, as a replacement.MethodsThe Digital Impact Factor incorporated modern measures of website authority and reach. This formula was applied to a cross-sectional study of active emergency medicine and critical care blogs and podcasts. For each website, we generated a Digital Impact Factor score based on Ahrefs Domain Rating and the follower count of the websites' pages from 8 social media platforms. A series of Spearman correlations provided evidence of association by comparing a rank-ordered list to rank lists derived from the Social Media Index over the last 5 years. The Bland-Altman analysis assessed for agreement.ResultsThe authors identified 88 relevant websites with a median Ahrefs Domain Rating of 28 (range 0 to 71, maximum 100) and total social media followership count across 8 platforms of 1,828,557. The Domain Rating and individual social media followership scores were normalized based on the highest recorded values to yield the Digital Impact Factor (median 4.57; range 0.02 to 9.50, maximum 10). The correlation between the 2022 Digital Impact Factor and the 2021 Social Media Index was 0.94 (95% confidence interval 0.89 to 0.97; p<.001; n=41 rankings correlated), suggesting that they measure similar constructs. The Bland-Altman plot also demonstrated fair agreement between the 2 scores.ConclusionThe Digital Impact Factor is a measure of the relative effect of educational blogs and podcasts within emergency medicine and critical care.Copyright © 2023 American College of Emergency Physicians. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

13 keywords...

hide…