Impact of Altmetrics in evaluation of scientific journals, research outputs and scientists’ careers: Views of editors of high impact anaesthesia, critical care and pain medicine journals

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Altmetrics represent the attention of an article drawn from social and mainstream media. The aim of this survey was to investigate the views of editors of high-impact journals on the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS), the number derived from an automated algorithm including a weighted count of mainstream news and social media sources. METHODS: A questionnaire related to the AAS was sent to the editors of high-impact journals, namely Anaesthesia, Critical Care Medicine (CCM) and Pain Medicine (PM). Eleven questions were related to the possible benefits and flaws of Altmetrics. RESULTS: Of the 1,381 editors asked, 126 answered. The overall answers showed that 76% of the editors were familiar with Altmetrics, 28% knew how AAS is calculated, 12% believed that AAS should replace traditional bibliometrics, 34% favoured AAS for journal ranking, 40% believed that AAS should be used to assess an article, 44% felt that AAS should be included in researchers’ curriculum vitae and 22% felt that it should be considered for grants. Sixty-two percent of editors believed that AAS is vulnerable to manipulations, 60% proposed improvement and 16% abandonment. Positive answers were similar across the fields, except for journal ranking. Fifty-four percent of editors of the CCM journals favoured journal ranking using AAS versus 28% and 26% editors of anaesthesia and PM journals (P = 0.025 and P = 0.006, respectively). CONCLUSION: A high percentage of editors believed that AAS should be used to assess scholarly output and that it should be included in the researchers’ curriculum vitae. Sixty percent of responders supported the improvement of AAS.