1. Introduction
Facebook, founded in February 2004, has become the world’s most popular online social networking website. This social networking website enables college students to keep constant connections with their friends and acquaintances. By September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users. Although some of which are fake, according to Cadie Thomson (2012), it still shows the grand influence of this virtual community. Facebook is ranked as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users (Andy Kazeniac, 2010).
Researchers have found that Facebook is not only applied as a way for users to digitally and socially interact with each other, but also serves as an efficient tool for spreading and discussing news and information (Lasorsa, Lewis and Holton, 2011). One of the major applications of Facebookis the ability to share information and state of one 's opinion by pressing the “like”-button. The buttons enable users to share different types of information.
Among this huge amount of information, there are increasing numbers of scientific lectures, projects and papers are shared within Facebook. Facebookhas gradually become an application used by university students for sharing academic messages. Before published in academic journals, some scientific manuscripts are firstly published on academic websites, for example, Harvard Business School website (http://hbswk.hbs.edu). If readers consider the manuscript useful or simply like it, they can express their opinions and feelings by clicking the “Facebook Like”button on the website. In this way, scientific manuscripts published on websites may reach a broader range of audiences and receive faster responses from the scientific community.
Today the number of citations and citation-based indicators are frequently used as bibliometric measures to assess the scientific impact of scientific journal articles. Since it displays a quantitative and objective measurement
Citations: are also viewed from different perspectives. Some regard citation as a system of reward. This view had partially serious consequences for the application of journal impact measures to science policy and research management (Pfeffer, 2007). The calculation of impact factor is: In a given year, the impact factor of a journal is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two (or five) preceding years (Moed, 2010). For comparing journals specializing in cutting-edge research, the immediacy index can provide a useful perspective (Quimette, 2006).