Evaluation of the correlation between Altmetric attention score and citation number of top 50 articles in hip fractures: a cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND: Publications quality evaluation gets more attention nowadays, because of its impact on researchers ranking and academic journals. Beside traditional bibliometric tools, altemetric metrics have been introduced as tools to evaluate the dissemination of a study by the number of views, mentions, and posts on different websites and social medias. METHOD: In this study, the authors evaluate the correlation between citation number as a traditional tool and altmetric attention score (AAS) as a new method. Scopus database was searched to find the 50 most cited manuscripts on “hip fractures” title from January 2015 to December 2020. After excluding irrelevant subjects, AAS of included articles was collected from the Altmetric.com website. At the last stage, the data were analyzed using statistical tests. RESULTS: According to statistical analysis, R (2) was 0.121, and the P-value was 0.017, which shows a weak but statistically significant relationship between citation and AAS. The relationship between the number of mentions on Twitter and the AAS was linear. The differences observed between the two groups were significant only in “Readers on Mendeley” and “Dimensions”. Results shown that the impact factor of the journal and the AAS of articles had no significant relationship (R (2)=0.001, P-value=0.986). CONCLUSION: Findings showed that social media does not seem to be ineffective in disseminating published articles. It has also been shown that Twitter can play a significant role in the propagation of articles on social networks. It is not unreasonable to say that the accessibility of a journal affects the dissemination of an article on social media. In the end, the authors found that the impact factor of the journal could not significantly affect the AAS.