Background: Dissemination of review results is one of the core objectives of Cochrane. With limited resources, how do we ensure maximum reach and impact for our reviews? Cochrane Work developed a new structured outreach strategy that is based on aligning dissemination efforts with domestic and international partner organizations. We aim to reduce repetition, expand reach and ultimately improve the uptake of review results.
Objectives: We report on the initial phase of our co-ordinated dissemination efforts in partnership with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in the USA.
Methods: We evaluate our concerted social media delivery with bibliometric and Altmetric data. To prepare for the release of the Cochrane Work review ‘Preventing occupational stress in healthcare workers’ we co-authored a NIOSH Science Blog and tweeted actively. We examined the effects of our dissemination efforts on blog views, number of tweets and review downloads.
Results: The NIOSH Science Blog reached 1149 views from 960 unique visitors between 10 December 2014 (release date) till 24 March 2015. The Altmetrics score for this review was 36 and included 32 tweets from 28 accounts with a total reach of 28,480 combined followers. Plotting the tweets along the same timeline as the number of downloads did not reveal a clear pattern. While the number of downloads only slightly increased after publishing the blog, the Altmetrics score was among the top 5% of the scores in the Cochrane Library.
Conclusions: While it is very early to evaluate our strategy beyond extended reach, partnering with institutions outside Cochrane improves dissemination efforts. It is feasible to use review downloads and Altmetrics scores as performance measures for review dissemination.