Analyzing the relationship between Altmetric score and literature citations in the Implantology literature

Abstract

Background The influence of research has long been studied using citations and impact factors (IFs). Electronic media is changing how people interact with the scientific literature. There are few investigations into these trends. Purpose To explore whether Altmetrics correlate with traditional bibliometrics in the Implantology literature. Materials and Methods Five Implantology journals with the highest IF and the 10 most highly‐cited articles within those journals from 2013 to 2016 were reviewed. Altmetric score, citation count, and media “mentions” were recorded. Comparisons were conducted between Altmetric score, citations, and IF by performing Pearson correlation coefficients and descriptive statistics. Twitter accounts were studied and compared to other metrics. Results Analysis revealed no correlation between citations and Altmetrics (r = .096,P = .506) or IF and Altmetrics (r = .111,P = .443) in 2013. Altmetrics were also not significantly correlated with citations (r = 0.148,P = .305) or IF (r = .145,P = .315) in 2016. Total Altmetric scores were nine times higher in 2016 compared to 2013, with news outlets and Twitter seeing large increases in mentions. Twitter was the top medium receiving mentions across the two cohorts. Conclusions Compared to other fields, Implantology articles received lower Altmetric scores, noting an area of improvement. Altmetrics at this time are insufficient to replace traditional bibliometrics, but may provide helpful real‐time information concerning article dissemination.

Trends in the level of evidence and impact of clinical studies published in leading oral implantology journals: 2008–2018

“…A previous study analyzed all dental studies (Kolahi & Khazaei, 2018), and the mean AAS was 3.7 and 4.1 for clinical trials and reviews, respectively. A recent study analyzed the ten most-cited articles in five journals and showed lower AAS in oral implantology (Warren, Patel, & Boyd, 2019).…”

The online attention to orthodontic research: an Altmetric analysis of the orthodontic journals indexed in the journal citation reports from 2014 to 2018

“…Comparing the result of Kolahi et al with ours, the difference in time between the two reports should be considered, given the extreme speed of web data flow. According to what was reported in implant dentistry literature, the AAS displayed a nine-fold increase comparing the top-cited journals in 2013 and 2016 [18]. A difference of as little as 1 year could result in a tremendous change in AAS value.…”

“…Altmetric claims to use a specific algorithm to limit the effect of such misconducts by tracking down artificial patterns of attention or detecting social media automation tools [10]. The very low number of patents in the studied period could indicate a sort of disconnection between orthodontic research and the industry in contrast to the findings in periodontics, endodontics, and implant dentistry [10,18,23].…”

The Altmetric era in eating disorder research: Assessing the association between Altmetric scores and citation scores for articles in the International Journal of Eating Disorders

“…In broader areas of medicine, such as critical care medicine, prior research suggests a moderately positive correlation between traditional citation methods and Altmetrics (Lehane & Black, 2020). However, no significant correlation between citation count and Altmetric score has been noted in endodontic research (Kolahi et al, 2020), and oral implantology research (Warren, Patel, & Boyd, 2020), although it is noteworthy Altmetric scores were low in these studies due to the specialized subject area.…”