Can promotion on WeChat official accounts improve scholarly journals' academic impact? A micro‐level correlation comparison study.

WeChat has been developed into a unique social media and an increasing number of scholarly journals in China use it to promote their content. However, the effectiveness of WeChat promotion on academic impact is still unknown. This study selected five Chinese journals and investigated papers published in 2018, looking at reading counts on WeChat official accounts and the citations recorded on China's largest scholarly repository, China national knowledge infrastructure (CNKI). The raw data were normalized to lower the effect of journal size and then stratified into four data sets of the top 50%, top 25%, top 10% and top 1%. The results indicate that significant positive correlations between WeChat reading counts and citations exist across the total data set and the data sets of top 50%, top 25% and top 10%. The data set of the top 1% could not be analysed due to the small number of papers. Three of the five journals and two data sets of the other two journals exhibit similar positive correlations. This study demonstrates that promotion of WeChat official accounts can influence the academic impact of individual papers, but further study is needed to clarify the exact thresholds and influential factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]