The 100 most impactful articles on the rotator cuff: an altmetric analysis of online media

PURPOSE: The purpose of our study was to use the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) to evaluate the 100 most impactful articles in online media pertaining to the rotator cuff and compare their characteristics to the most-cited rotator cuff articles in the scientific literature. METHODS: We performed an article extraction using Altmetric Explorer to identify all published articles pertaining to the rotator cuff. The top 100 articles with the highest AAS were included for analysis. Several data elements were extracted for each included article: title, article type, article topic, year of publication, journal name, authors, institutional affiliations, and online mentions (i.e. the number of times the article was mentioned in news, blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia sources). The geographic origin of each article was also determined by the institutional affiliation of the first author, which was categorized as American (originating in the United States), European (originating in Europe), or other. RESULTS: The 100 articles with the highest AAS were published between 2009 and 2020, with AAS ranging from 47 to 676 (median: 74.5, 25(th) percentile: 59.5, 75(th) percentile: 114.5). Of all online media sources, Twitter correlated most strongly with AAS (r = 0.9007, r(2) = 0.8112). The selected articles were most frequently published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine (13), the Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery (11), and the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (7). The most common article type was Systematic Review/Meta-Analysis (29%), followed by Randomized Controlled Trial (15%). The top 3 AAS articles were all published by authors based in Europe. CONCLUSION: The most impactful rotator cuff articles in online media generated substantial online attention. These studies were often performed in Europe and tended to be high level of evidence, focusing on treatment of rotator cuff pathology. The rotator cuff articles that produced the most online attention differed from a previous report of the most-cited rotator cuff articles, suggesting that alternative metrics may be used in concert with conventional bibliometrics to obtain a more complete representation of scientific impact.