Editorial Commentary: Infographics Engage a Broader Audience Than Traditional Scientific Articles in the Medical Literature: The Latest Social Media Influencer?

Abstract

Infographics are an evolving medium within the orthopaedic literature and support engagement of a broad audience than traditional scientific articles. Arthroscopy infographics have been published monthly since January 2019 on a range of topics relevant to the readership. Citation numbers have long been used as a metric for quality and relevance of a scientific article, although alternative metrics (altmetrics) are now available to quantify the online activity related to scholarly content. Altmetrics are defined as "metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics," and the altmetric attention score depends on 3 main factors: volume (number of "mentions"), sources (e.g. newspaper, blog, tweet), and author (source of the "mention", e.g. physician vs journal). Recent research links altmetric scores to citation gains. Infographics are a tool for expanding, educating, and increasing the breadth of medical journal readership.