207 - Increasing access to narrative medicine through the Academic Pediatrics podcast and the impact on journal metrics.

Publication Number: 4204.207

Michael Cosimini, Oregon Health Sciences University, PORTLAND, OR, United States; Terry Kind, Children's National Health System, Washington, DC, United States

Background: Healthcare professionals find podcasts an accessible method for personalized learning and a connection to the professional community. Journals use podcasts to reach them, towards a variety of ends. These include: increasing dissemination of content outside of the journal’s audience, increasing journal metrics like downloads and citations, and building community. There is limited data on the impact of podcasts in achieving these outcomes, and studies showing that podcasts increase the citation of articles are often confounded by the process of selection of articles to be featured on podcasts (1).

Objective: We aim to determine the impact of sharing narrative medicine essays in podcast format by analyzing data on dissemination and readership metrics in a natural experiment based on author participation. We hypothesized that articles from the Academic Pediatrics journal’s “In the Moment” section shared via podcast reach an audience outside of the journal’s typical readers, and this would not impact the existing readership already accessing the written articles.

Design/Methods: “In the Moment” is a narrative medicine section of Academic Pediatrics launched in 2006. Since 2024, authors publishing “In the Moment” articles have been offered the opportunity to record and submit an audio version of their piece, for inclusion in the journal's podcast. Articles and podcasts published from January 2024 through October 2025 were analyzed for this study. Readership was measured by article download or full text access (scrolling through the entire article) with data pulled from both the journal’s webpage and Elsevier’s ScienceDirect platform. Podcast listens were measured by episode download statistic from the podcast hosting platform Podbean which includes streaming and downloads on many platforms.

Results: Thirteen “In the Moment” episodes were published during the study period, with a mean of 151 listens per episode. At the time of this writing, journal metrics were available for a subset of articles in the study period, including nine articles where authors opted to record for the podcast, and seven where they did not participate. For articles featured on the podcast, the mean number of readers was 455, whereas articles not featured on the podcast had a mean of 449 readers (p=0.96).

Conclusion(s): Sharing narrative medicine pieces by podcast reaches an audience without impacting article downloads. While there may be some overlap between listeners and readers, we believe this data indicates that the podcast is successfully increasing dissemination of the journal outside of its typical audience.

1. 10.1148/radiol.233057