Evaluating Neurosurgery Residency Program Reputation Through the Lens of Social Media

Introduction: In the 21st century, the impact of social media on a program’s reputation is extremely relevant. While literature correlating a program’s research productivity to its reputation is plentiful, few analyses exist to compare social media outreach to a program’s reputation. The AltmetricTM tool is a new software that aims to capture online attention towards research and quantifies a paper’s impact on news sites, blogs, platforms such as Twitter (X), Facebook, Wikipedia, and more. These factors are included in a paper’s attention score, of which a higher value indicates greater impact. Using this software, we assessed the top 25 neurosurgery residency programs through the lenses of research productivity and social media influence.

Methods: Faculty members of the top 25 neurosurgery residency programs as ranked by reputation on Doximity were included in this analysis. Data gathered included physician H-index, number of unique publications, and their three most cited publications. For each publication, its number of citations, year published, attention score, and specific social media instances were gathered. Statistical significance between variables was evaluated using linear regressions as well as Pearson and Spearman correlations.

Results: The top 25 neurosurgery residency programs averaged 161 unique publications, 419 citations, and 62.38 attention score across their faculty members. Spearman’s correlation test between a neurosurgeon’s scopus citations and attention score produced an R2 of .523 (p <.001), indicating a moderately strong correlation. Linear regression of a program’s average citations vs average attention score per physician revealed an R2 of .35, indicating a moderate correlation. Spearman’s correlation test indicated a negative correlation between a program’s average publications and tweets (rho = -0.2561538, p < .05).

Conclusion : Statistical analysis revealed significant correlations surrounding physicians’ research output and their social media impact. Our analysis may shed light on the trends in academic productivity and social media surrounding prestigious neurosurgery residency programs.