The following is a summary of “Digital Impact Factor: A Quality Index for Educational Blogs and Podcasts in Emergency Medicine and Critical Care,” published in the July 2023 issue of Emergency Medicine by Lin et al.

Considering the widespread use of educational blogs and podcasts in medicine, learners and educators must possess resources to discern reliable and influential platforms. The Social Media Index was a multifactorial algorithm to assess the impact of emergency medicine and critical care blogs in the medical field. In 2022, a crucial medical data point for the Social Media Index became inaccessible. This bibliometric study aimed to develop a new medical measure, the Digital Impact Factor, as a replacement. The Digital Impact Factor integrated contemporary metrics of website credibility and influence. This formula was utilized in a cross-sectional study of active emergency medicine and critical care blogs and podcasts.

Researchers calculated each website’s Digital Impact Factor score by considering the Ahrefs Domain Rating and the number of followers on the websites’ pages across 8 social media platforms.  A series of Spearman correlations were conducted to examine the association between a rank-ordered list and rank lists derived from the Social Media Index over the past 5 years, providing medical evidence of the relationship—the Bland-Altman analysis was evaluated for concordance. The researchers identified 88 pertinent medical websites with a median Ahrefs Domain Rating of 28 (ranging from 0 to 71, with a maximum of 100) and a combined count of 1,828,557 followers across 8 social media platforms. The Domain Rating and individual social media followership scores were standardized using the highest recorded values to calculate the Digital Impact Factor (median 4.57; range 0.02 to 9.50, maximum 10).

The association between the 2022 Digital Impact Factor and the 2021 Social Media Index exhibited a correlation coefficient 0.94 (95% CI 0.89 to 0.97; P<.001; n=41 rankings correlated), indicating that these metrics assess comparable concepts. The Bland-Altman plot also exhibited satisfactory concordance between the two scores. The Digital Impact Factor is a metric that quantifies the comparative impact of educational blogs and podcasts in emergency medicine and critical care.

Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196064423001191