Social attention and scientific articles on stroke: Altmetric analysis of top-50 articles

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clineuro.2019.105386Get rights and content

Highlights

  • ā€¢

    The Altmetrics is an automatically calculated metric for monitoring social media.

  • ā€¢

    This is the first study of an Altmetric analysis on stroke using social media.

  • ā€¢

    Almost top-10 ranked articles were about modifiable risk factors.

  • ā€¢

    There are some discrepancies in perspectives between scientists and social media.

Abstract

Objective

It is well known that social media influences politics and the economy. A new Web-based metric (Altmetrics) has recently been developed for use in scientific fields. The aim of this study was to determine which recent papers in the field of stroke have received the greatest amount of attention from the general public. The Altmetric Attention Score is an automatically calculated metric for monitoring social media.

Patients and methods

An Altmetric Explorer search was performed on May 25, 2018 to extract the following information: (i) journal name, (ii) journal impact factor (IF), (iii) year of publication, (iv) article topic, (v) article type, and (vi) stroke subtype.

Results

The journal that published articles that received the most attention on social media was Stroke (nā€Æ=ā€Æ16). Articles with higher IFs are not expected to receive greater attention on social media. Twenty-one of the identified articles related to the subtypes of ischemic stroke. Regarding contents, approximately half of the top-10 ranked articles were about modifiable risk factors, especially diet and physical activities. Two recent articles on the extension of mechanical thrombectomy after 6ā€Æh were included on this list.

Conclusions

There are some discrepancies in perspectives between scientific articles and general social media, and the Altmetric Attention Score is considered to more dynamically reflect the interests of the general public. We therefore suggest that physicians can use Altmetric analysis to identify what the general public actually wants to know about in the real world, while they should also have a critical view of the social media that attracts the public with a stimulating theme rather than a worthy subject.

Introduction

The number of times that published articles are cited is generally used to measure the impact of a journal and to evaluate the competence of authors. A citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source, and is based on the bibliometrics that explored these associations. This analysis is used to rank articles, with the citation rank used to identify published output that has had the greatest intellectual impact. Many medical specialists use bibliometric analysis to identify the most significant papers in their field, such as general surgery [1], emergency surgery [2], and neurology [3]. However, citations take a long time to accumulate, and the total number of citations may be affected by the time that has elapsed since publication.

A new Web-based metric (Altmetrics) has led to fast and dynamic analyses of the influence on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Social media is well known to influence politics and the economy, and has also received considerable attention from different perspectives in various medical fields. The aim of this study was to determine which recent papers in the field of stroke have received the highest Altmetric Attention Scores (AASs).

Section snippets

Search engine

Altmetric Explorer (Altmetric, London, UK) is a Web-based application that can be used to search the following sources of research output, to yield the most-relevant and up-to-date picture of the following types of online activity and discussion: [4]

  • 1

    Public policy documents.

  • 2

    Blogs. There are >9000 academic and nonacademic blogs.

  • 3

    Mainstream media. There are >2000 media outlets worldwide.

  • 4

    Citations.

  • 5

    Online reference managers.

  • 6

    Research highlights from F1000.

  • 7

    Postpublication peer-review platforms.

  • 8

    Social

Results

Altmetric Explorer identified 43,410 articles as being referred to online. The AAS, journal name, IF ranking, publication year, numbers of citations, and numbers of annual citations of the top-50 articles are summarized in Table 1. Because Altmetrics started collecting data only during the second half of 2011, none of the articles before 2010 were listed. The number of papers on this list peaked in 2016 (Supplementary Fig. I). Sixteen articles originated from the Stroke journal, accounting for

Discussion

To the authorsā€™ knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate the online attention received by articles published in the stroke field. The journals that published articles receiving the most attraction on social media were Stroke (nā€Æ=ā€Æ16) and the New England Journal of Medicine (nā€Æ=ā€Æ8). Twenty-one articles were on the subtypes of IS. Regarding contents, treatment and management and risk factors for stroke received the most attention. It is noteworthy that about half of the top-10 ranked

Author contributions

YK and JSB conducted the search and content analysis and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. D-YY assisted with the search and content analysis and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All reviewed and commented on multiple drafts of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Sources of funding

Jong Seok Bae: This research was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (grant NRF-2017R1D1A1B03029672).

Yerim Kim: This research was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (NRF-2018R1C1B5086320).

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