Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 13, 2020
Date Accepted: Dec 12, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 6, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Assessment of the dissemination of COVID-19 articles across social media- An Altmetrics and PlumX Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The use of social media assists in the distribution of information about COVID-19 to the general public and health professionals. Alternative-level metrics (Altmetrics) and PlumX metrics are new methods that can assess the amount of sharing and spreading of a scientific article in social media platforms.
Objective:
Our objective was to characterize the traditional metrics (citation-count) and new metrics of the top 100 Altmetric scored COVID-19 articles.
Methods:
100 highest Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) articles were identified utilizing the Altmetric explorer in May 2020. AAS, journal name, and mentions from various social media databases of each article were collected. Citation-counts and PlumX Weighted Citation Impact scores were collected from the Scopus database. Additionally, AAS, PlumX scores, and citation-counts were log-transformed and adjusted by +1 for linear regression, and Spearman correlation coefficients were utilized to determine correlations.
Results:
The median AAS, PlumX score, and citation-count were 4922.50, 37.92, and 24.00, respectively. Of 100 articles, New England Journal of Medicine published the most articles. Twitter was the most frequently used social media platform. Positive correlations were seen between AAS and citation-count (R2=0.0973; P=0.002, and PlumX score and citation-count (R2=0.8911; P<0.001).
Conclusions:
Our research demonstrates that citation-count is weakly correlated with AAS, but strongly correlated with PlumX scores regarding COVID-19 articles at this point in time. Altmetrics and PlumX metrics should utilized in complement with traditional citation-count when assessing the dissemination and impact of an article regarding COVID-19.
Citation
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Copyright
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