Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Jul 24, 2022
Date Accepted: May 23, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 21, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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 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) is a new method that assesses the amount of sharing and spreading of a scientific article on social media platforms.
Objective:
Our objective was to characterize and compare traditional bibliometrics (citation-count and impact factors) with newer metrics (Altmetric Attention Score) of the top 100 Altmetric scored COVID-19 articles.
Methods:
The 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 were collected from the Scopus database. Additionally, AAS and citation-counts were log-transformed and adjusted by +1 for linear regression. Spearman correlation coefficients were utilized to determine correlations.
Results:
The median AAS and citation-count were 4922.50 and 24.00, respectively. Of 100 articles, The New England Journal of Medicine published the most articles at 18% (18/100). Twitter was the most frequently used social media platform with 96.3% of the mentions (985,429/1,022,975). Positive correlations were seen between AAS and citation-count (r2=.0973; P=.002).
Conclusions:
Our research demonstrates that citation-count positively correlated with AAS regarding COVID-19 articles at this point in time. Altmetrics should be utilized in complement with traditional citation-count when assessing the dissemination and impact of an article regarding COVID-19. Clinical Trial: NA
Citation
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Copyright
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