Society Using Social Media to Increase Journal Citations
The Society is leveraging the staff’s social media expertise to help members promote their research in the digital realm. Do you know the saying, “If you teach a man to fish…”? Well if you teach an endocrinologist to tweet, he or she will be well positioned to drive readers to their published work and potentially increase citations of their papers. If enough members take up this social media approach, the attention papers generate might even raise the Impact Factor of our journals!
Endocrinology editor-in-chief Andrea Gore, PhD, University of Texas at Austin, agreed to give Twitter and Facebook a whirl to promote her recent article that focused on developing an animal model of menopause. With a coordinated campaign utilizing Gore’s new personal accounts (follow her on Twitter at @andreacgore), the Society’s platforms, and the University’s accounts, we saw impressive results. During the first week of the campaign, Gore’s paper received 10 times more clicks than two other Endocrinology papers that debuted the same day.
The staff is looking for other newly accepted papers to promote in a follow-up case study. Once we have sufficient data, we plan to develop online resources to teach members and journal authors how to use social media to spread the word about their work. Stay tuned!
JCEM Study on EDCs Garners Headlines Around the World
The Society advanced its thought leadership on endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) with a media campaign around a new Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism study.
The Washington Post, Forbes, and National Geographic were among the top-tier outlets that covered the research. The study, “DDT Exposure in Utero and Breast Cancer,” found an association between prenatal exposure to the pesticide DDT and breast cancer risk in a group of women born between 1959 and 1967 in California. NBC Nightly News aired a story about it on June 21.
Other notable outlets that covered the study included Time magazine, Fox News, NBC News, CBS News, and Science magazine’s blog Science Shot.
To support ongoing EDC advocacy efforts in the European Union, the Society also distributed the press release to media contacts at key outlets there, including The Times of London, Spanish newspaper El Mundo, and Journal de l’Environnement. The Parisian newspaper Le Monde published a front page story on the JCEM study on June 18.
EPA Announces Changes to Screening Tests
On Friday, June 19, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a notice announcing their intention to change the agency’s approach to screening chemicals for endocrine activity. The Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP) was established in 1996 by the EPA in response to amendments to the Food Quality Protection Act and Safe Drinking Water Act. To evaluate chemicals for endocrine activity, the EDSP sets criteria to require screening, and develops and validates two tiers of assays to test chemicals for endocrine activity. Tier 1 screens are designed to identify chemicals with the potential for endocrine activity, while the Tier 2 screening battery is designed to identify specific endocrine effects at various doses.
The EPA plans to incorporate “validated high throughput assays and a computational model” as alternatives for three of the current assays in the Tier 1 screening battery. Specifically, the EPA proposes to use the 18 Estrogen Receptor (ER) screening assays from the ToxCast™ER Model for bioactivity. ToxCast is the EPA’s Toxicity Forecaster, a program that “uses automated, robotics-assisted high throughput assays to expose living cells or proteins to chemicals and measure the results.” ToxCast data are made available to the public through the integrated Chemical Safety for Sustainability (iCSS) dashboard.
Take Action: The Endocrine Society wants to ensure that the Tier 1 screening batter maintains the ability to identify all chemicals that have the potential for endocrine activity. We encourage interested members of the Society to examine the Federal Register notice proposing the integration of ToxCast into the EDSP and submit comments to the EPA.
To provide input on the Endocrine Society’s formal response, please send your comments to Joseph Laakso, Associate Director of Science Policy at [email protected].
Endocrine Reviews Maintains Top Impact Factor
The Society’s journal Endocrine Reviews ranked first in Impact Factor in the “Endocrinology and Metabolism” category, according to Thomson Reuters’ recently released annual Journal Citation Report (JCR) for 2014.
Endocrine Reviews led the 128 journals in the “Endocrinology and Metabolism” category and has ranked at the top of the category for more than five years. A highly regarded metric used to measure the success of scholarly journals, the 2014 Impact Factor is calculated by tracking how many times articles that were published in 2012 and 2013 were cited during 2014. The number of citations is then divided by the total number of articles published in 2012 and 2013 to arrive at the Impact Factor.
Endocrine Reviews retained its ranking as the top journal in the field of Endocrinology & Metabolism, with an Impact Factor of 21.059 for 2014. The journal’s Impact Factor rose from 19.358 in 2013.
“It is an honor to see Endocrine Reviews has once again earned the highest Impact Factor in the Endocrinology & Metabolism category,” said Leonard Wartofsky, MD, who was named Editor-in-Chief of the journal in April. “This is a fitting tribute to the quality work our authors, reviewers and editors produce. I am pleased to be part of the journal’s tradition of excellence.”
Endocrine Reviews publishes bimonthly comprehensive, authoritative, and timely review articles balancing both experimental and clinical endocrinology themes
Loading ...