Visual Abstracts: Report and suggestions

 

Since July 2018 (issue 45), we “forced” all the authors to submit a Visual Abstract with the paper to be published in Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale. We opened a YouTube channel dedicated to the FIS Visual Abstracts and we started publishing the Visual Abstracts … we think that after four years we have to check if it was a good idea and if this channel is useful for the authors to spread their own papers and if this channel is appreciated by the readers.

But first of all… what is a Visual Abstract (VA)? There is not a “standard” definition! For Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, a VA is short length presentation (2 minutes max) with the “core” of the paper. Longer VA are accepted, but we warmly advice all our authors to submit short VA, as the readers strongly appreciate them. We offer a tutorial to help the authors to prepare these visual abstracts: LINK.

At the moment, we have 51488 visualizations with 534 subscribers. The result is really interesting and it confirms the channel usefulness… but let’s check some diagrams.

Visualizations vs time

Viewers age

Traffic sources

Considering the diagrams above, the main comments are:

• The channel visibility and usefulness is more and more increasing: the visualization vs time diagram clearly shows this trend.
• VAs usefulness is confirmed, especially with younger researchers (more than 88% of our viewers is younger than 34!);
• The VA channel usefulness is confirmed by the traffic sources: only about 20%  of the views are due to links with the journal website or to links in playlist. About 80% of the views are due to searches that are “external” or directly on YouTube!

But … we want more! 

Please, post your comments and your suggestions… they will be warmly appreciated!