Analysis of altmetrics and additional metrics of the 50 most-cited Behçet articles of all time: A Web of Science-based study

Objective: The number of citations is used for the scholarly impact of a published article, but it does not always correlate with higher-quality research. Behçet’s disease (BD) is a debilitating-blinding disorder with a significant volume of published articles in literature. Our aim was to investigate the references of the 50 most-cited Behçet articles and to evaluate the relationship between altmetric attention score (AAS) and additional metrics. Methods: The Web of Science (WoS) core collection was used to search for the 50 most-cited Behçet articles. Additional metrics and AAS of the reviewed articles and the journals in which the articles were published, were evaluated. Results: A total of 11.372 published articles on BD, between 1975 and 2022, were found. The citation range of 50 highly-cited articles was between 172 and 1322. The “top 50 list” articles were published between 1988 and 2018, and the average age of the article since publication was 18.86 ± 6.08 years. Rheumatology journals were the most published category with 21 articles. There was a weak-to-moderate correlation between AAS and additional metrics. Conclusions: This is the first analysis regarding the AAS of the 50 most-cited articles on BD, which provides useful information about the social impact and characteristics in the academic community. AAS correlates weakly with citation-based quality indexes, and moderately with immediacy index, which evaluates speed. The publication year should be considered when comparing or evaluating the AAS of articles. AAS could be evaluated in a secondary plan for scientific impact analysis.