↓ Skip to main content

Trial Promoter: A Web-Based Tool for Boosting the Promotion of Clinical Research Through Social Media

Overview of attention for article published in Journal of Medical Internet Research, June 2016
Altmetric Badge

About this Attention Score

  • In the top 25% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (81st percentile)
  • Average Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source

Mentioned by

twitter
20 X users
facebook
2 Facebook pages

Citations

dimensions_citation
4 Dimensions

Readers on

mendeley
52 Mendeley
You are seeing a free-to-access but limited selection of the activity Altmetric has collected about this research output. Click here to find out more.
Title
Trial Promoter: A Web-Based Tool for Boosting the Promotion of Clinical Research Through Social Media
Published in
Journal of Medical Internet Research, June 2016
DOI 10.2196/jmir.4726
Pubmed ID
Authors

Katja Reuter, Francis Ukpolo, Edward Ward, Melissa L Wilson, Praveen Angyan

Abstract

Scarce information about clinical research, in particular clinical trials, is among the top reasons why potential participants do not take part in clinical studies. Without volunteers, on the other hand, clinical research and the development of novel approaches to preventing, diagnosing, and treating disease are impossible. Promising digital options such as social media have the potential to work alongside traditional methods to boost the promotion of clinical research. However, investigators and research institutions are challenged to leverage these innovations while saving time and resources. To develop and test the efficiency of a Web-based tool that automates the generation and distribution of user-friendly social media messages about clinical trials. Trial Promoter is developed in Ruby on Rails, HTML, cascading style sheet (CSS), and JavaScript. In order to test the tool and the correctness of the generated messages, clinical trials (n=46) were randomized into social media messages and distributed via the microblogging social media platform Twitter and the social network Facebook. The percent correct was calculated to determine the probability with which Trial Promoter generates accurate messages. During a 10-week testing phase, Trial Promoter automatically generated and published 525 user-friendly social media messages on Twitter and Facebook. On average, Trial Promoter correctly used the message templates and substituted the message parameters (text, URLs, and disease hashtags) 97.7% of the time (1563/1600). Trial Promoter may serve as a promising tool to render clinical trial promotion more efficient while requiring limited resources. It supports the distribution of any research or other types of content. The Trial Promoter code and installation instructions are freely available online.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 20 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 52 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United States 1 2%
Italy 1 2%
Unknown 50 96%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Researcher 8 15%
Other 5 10%
Student > Bachelor 5 10%
Student > Ph. D. Student 4 8%
Student > Master 4 8%
Other 11 21%
Unknown 15 29%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 9 17%
Nursing and Health Professions 6 12%
Computer Science 5 10%
Arts and Humanities 2 4%
Social Sciences 2 4%
Other 10 19%
Unknown 18 35%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 9. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 14 September 2017.
All research outputs
#3,799,858
of 25,377,790 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Medical Internet Research
#2,974
of 7,867 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#65,465
of 367,290 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Medical Internet Research
#59
of 120 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,377,790 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 83rd percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 7,867 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 19.8. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 62% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 367,290 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 81% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 120 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 50% of its contemporaries.