The main objective of this work is to show how the correct application of cybermetric techniques to Pediatrics can provide a huge amount of information that, properly analyzed and contextualized, can allow and facilitate strategic decision making to the different agents involved directly or indirectly with Pediatrics. To do this, two complementary analyzes are proposed. The objective of the first analysis is to determine the online presence of Spanish pediatric societies. To this end, various online metrics related to the presence, visibility, impact and connectivity of 39 associations were collected. The results indicate that the Spanish pediatric societies do not have websites of great impact and that they mainly use Facebook and Twitter, although the use of these platforms differs widely among Societies, reflecting the existence of different web communication strategies. The objective of the second analysis is to evaluate the impact of the hashtags related to vaccination on Twitter, for which we analyzed hashtags in Spanish related to the systematic vaccines recommended by the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (a total of 18). The results show a low volume of content (few tweets), that arouse little interest (few comments) and that obtain a diffusion (retweets) and impact (likes) moderate.

Scientists have generally found on social media a valid platform to support their efforts to increase visibility of their scientific work between their peers. Pediatricians, in particular, can use social media with different objectives, depending on the social media or social network, in which they participate. Reasons why the pediatrician should participate in social media are studied, the differences between both types of social networks (vertical or scientific versus generalists) and how to estimate the likely audience in order to optimize the visibility efforts of pediatric professionals in both types, when networking. Some best practices in both categories are outlined as well.