988368

● The medians of the H Index and the SJR were significantly higher as compared with the journals without social networks in physical medicine and rehabilitation journals with social networks.
● Among the analyzed social networks, the most commonly used was Facebook followed by Twitter.
● There is a moderate correlation between the SJR and the number of followers in Twitter.

Plain Language Summary 
Our research seeks to evaluate the dissemination of information by scientific journals of physical medicine and rehabilitation. We evaluated the correlation between the presence of physical medicine and rehabilitation journals in social networks through indicators of social networks activity (number of followers, number of tweets) and the SJR impact factor (numeric value indicating the number of citations per year per manuscript published in a journal during the previous 3 years). Out of the 122 physical medicine and rehabilitation journals reviewed in the SCImago ranking platform, 25.4% were active at least in one social network. Among the analyzed social networks, the most commonly used was Facebook followed by Twitter. The H Index and SJR medians were significantly better in journals with the presence in social networks and the group of journals with social networks was more frequently classified in the Q1 quartile. Our data suggest that social networks facilitate access to information in real time reaching a wider audience. We found that having social networks is associated with a greater impact on scientific journals of physical medicine and rehabilitation. We consider social networks an opportunity for many journals to expand their scope, improve their visibility and interaction with readers, and finally, social networks can provide to the authors a tool to select the best journal to widely diffuse their research results.