WeChat Presence of Chinese Scholarly Journal: An Analysis of CSCD-indexed Journals

The study of how science is discussed and how scholarly actors interact on social media has increasingly become popular in scientometrics in recent years. Following our previous study on WeChat (a Chinese social network app) uptake of Chinese scholarly journals in social science area, this study investigates the WeChatuptake by the Chinese scholarly journals indexed by the China Science Citation Database (CSCD). The results show that 83.99% of CSCD-indexed journals have created WeChat public accounts much higher than 65.3% of CSSCI and posted over 575 thousand posts. At the journal level, bibliometric indicators (e.g., citations, downloads, and journal impact factors) and WeChat indicators (e.g., clicks, likes, replies, and recommendations) are weakly correlated with each other. As we divided CSCD-indexed journals into three categories, bibliometric and WeChat indicators have the strongest correlation in the category of Medical Science. In contrast to Natural Science and Engineering category, the journals in medical science category show better performance in all WeChat activity indicators