Analysis of Trending Topics in Breast Cancer Articles From an Altmetric Perspective

Background It is widely known that social media has an impact on politics and the economy. The Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) is a new Web-based metric that was recently developed for use in the scientific field. The objective of this study was to assess which recent studies on the topic of breast cancer received the most attention from the general public. Methodology An Altmetric Explorer search was performed on January 7, 2022, to extract the following information: journal name, impact factor (IF), year of publication, article topic, article type, and level of evidence. Results The journal that published articles that received the most attention on social media was the New England Journal of Medicine (n = 8). All of the articles were published in journals in the highest IF quartile. The most frequent top three subjects in the top 50 articles were “treatment and management,” “risk factors for breast cancer,” and “breast cancer screening.” The number of articles with a level of evidence of 1, 2, 3, and 4 was 12, 17, 17, and 4, respectively. The correlation between AAS and citation was not significant. Conclusions The AAS seems to be a more reliable assessment of public perception of breast cancer. We propose that combining the AAS and traditional metrics may provide a more detailed description of scientific research output.