Increasing the Reach, Usage, and Impact of Scholarly Content

Scholarly communication is facing an information overload crisis. There are now over 8,000 new papers published daily. Aside from the difficulty readers face in keeping up with the literature, the deluge of papers is making it less likely for any given paper to be read, used, and ultimately cited. The growing information overload problem has created a pressing need for evidence-based strategies to disseminate scholarly content. This thesis aims to evaluate whether a novel content distribution channel, TrendMD, could be used to augment the reach, usage, and impact of published peer-reviewed content. We conducted four experimental studies. The first study was a 6-week randomized controlled trial where we found that TrendMD conferred an 87% visibility advantage relative to control articles, as measured by a statistically significant increase in pageviews. The second study, which was a 3-week crossover trial, found that TrendMD yielded a statistically significant 30% and 49% weekly visibility advantage; the higher the intensity of article promotion in TrendMD, the more significant the increase in pageviews. For the third study, we conducted a 4-week randomized controlled trial and found that TrendMD conferred a statistically significant 77% and 95% increase in Mendeley saves and pageviews, respectively, relative to control. These results were particularly significant since replicated evidence indicates that Mendeley saves are a robust predictor of citations. Accordingly, in our fourth study, we conducted a 12-month randomized controlled trial examining to what extent TrendMD may increase citations of scholarly content. At six months, we found that TrendMD yielded a 21% and 55% statistically significant increase in mean citations and Mendeley saves, respectively, relative to control. At 12-months, we found that TrendMD had an even larger, statistically significant effect on citations; articles randomized to TrendMD showed a 50% increase in citations relative to control. Taken together, our results suggest that the promotion of scholarly articles in TrendMD is an effective way to increase the reach, usage, and impact of those articles. The data presented in this thesis address a pressing unmet need for evidence-based strategies that can be used by scholarly content producers to disseminate published research.

Department dc:contributor.department

Medical Science

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Kudlow, Paul

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Reithmeier, Reinhart

• Bibliometrics
• Knowledge dissemination
• Knowledge translation
• Scholarly communication

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/101084

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/101084