The alleged citation advantage of video abstracts may be a matter of self-citations and self-selection bias. Comment on “The impact of video abstract on citation counts” by Zong et al

Video or perish? An analysis of video abstract author guidelines

This article reports on an analysis of author guidelines to examine the influence of academic publishers and journals over the video abstract as an emerging genre. The data consist of author guidelines from a Spanish journal index and were analyzed based on a two-layered multimodal analysis adapted from the Genre and Multimodality model. The layout layer concerns the organizational features of author guidelines, while the thematic layer focuses on the content themes. The analysis shows that the selected author guidelines do not share many commonalities as expected; rather, they display miscellaneous features, even in technological specifications where standardization should be the norm. The analysis indicates that academic publishers and other stakeholders should shoulder greater responsibilities such as quality assurance in transitioning to multimodal spaces.