Assessment of the Dissemination of COVID-19-Related Articles Across Social Media: Altmetrics Study

Overview

Journal JMIR Form Res

Publisher JMIR Publications

Specialty Biomedical Engineering

Date 2023 Jun 21

PMID 37343075

Authors

Haley Tornberg

Carine Moezinia

Chapman Wei

Simone A Bernstein

Chaplin Wei

Refka Al-Beyati

Theodore Quan

David J Diemert

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

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 (ie, Altmetrics) is an alternative method to traditional bibliometrics that assess the extent of dissemination of a scientific article on social media platforms.

Objective: Our study objective was to characterize and compare traditional bibliometrics (citation count) with newer metrics (Altmetric Attention Score [AAS]) of the top 100 Altmetric-scored articles on COVID-19.

Methods: The top 100 articles with the highest AAS were identified using the Altmetric explorer in May 2020. AAS, journal name, and mentions from various social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, Mendeley, and Dimension) were collected for each article. Citation counts were collected from the Scopus database.

Results: The median AAS and citation count were 4922.50 and 24.00, respectively. TheNew England Journal of Medicine published the most articles (18/100, 18%). Twitter was the most frequently used social media platform with 985,429 of 1,022,975 (96.3%) mentions. Positive correlations were observed between AAS and citation count (r=0.0973; P=.002).

Conclusions: Our research characterized the top 100 COVID-19-related articles by AAS in the Altmetric database. Altmetrics could complement traditional citation count when assessing the dissemination of an article regarding COVID-19.

International Registered Report Identifier (irrid): RR2-10.2196/21408.

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