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.
Introduction
The number of times published articles are cited is a common metric for determining a journal’s impact. Researchers use citation analysis (bibliometric analysis) to identify the most valuable publications in their fields,such as oncology , ophthalmology , and cardiology . Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute of Scientific Information, was the first to apply this method to scientific publications in the 1970s. Although citation analysis is a frequently used tool, its most important disadvantage is that the length of time that has passed since publication may have an impact on the total number of citations. Additionally, citations only reflect the impact on the scientific community but do not show the impact on politicians, patients, or the general public.
Over the last few years, the importance of social media platforms in the promotion, dissemination, and presentation of medical literature has been markedly enhanced. Fast and dynamic assessments of the influence on social media platforms have been facilitated by a new Web-based metric (Altmetrics). The Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) is a quantitative and qualitative measurement that complements standard citation-based measures. It analyzes the interactions of academics, scholars, and scientists as captured by reference management tools and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs. The purpose of this research was to determine which recent breast cancer papers had the highest AAS.
Materials & Methods
Search engine
Altmetric Explorer (London, UK) is an internet-based tool that searches various sources of research output to produce the most relevant and up-to-date picture of the different types of online activity and discussion.
Altmetric Explorer sources
1. Public policy documents
2. Blogs. There are >9,000 academic and non-academic blogs
3. Mainstream media. There are >4,000 outlets worldwide
4. Citations
5. Online reference managers
6. Research highlights
7. Post-publication peer-review platforms such as Pubpeer and Publons
8. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Sina Weibo, and Pinterest
9. Wikipedia (tracks the 12 different language versions of Wikipedia)
10. Open Syllabus Project, which involves >4,000 institutions worldwide
11. Multimedia and other online platforms, such as YouTube, Reddit, and Q&A
12. Patents using data from IFI CLAIMS
Table 1: Altmetric Explorer (London, UK) sources.
The AAS is generated automatically using a weighted count of all the attention given to research output. The Altmetric donut and the AAS are designed to make determining how much and what type of attention a particular research product has received easier . Volume, sources, and authors are the three main components. The Altmetric donut is colored to represent a different source of attention
Conclusions
One of the novel measures of citations in social media is AAS analysis. This study provides useful information about the impact of the top 50 breast cancer articles in both academia and social media. The AAS seems to be a more reliable assessment of public perception of breast cancer. Finally, we propose that combining the AAS and traditional metrics may provide a more detailed description of scientific research output.
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