Characteristics of the Most Cited, Most Downloaded, and Most Mentioned Articles in General Medical Journals: A Comparative Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

We compared the characteristics of the most cited, most downloaded, and most mentioned (the highest Altmetric Attention Score) articles published in general medical journals. We identified the 640 most frequently cited, 662 most frequently downloaded, and 652 most mentioned articles from 48 general medical journals. A comparison was made of the following characteristics of articles in the most cited, most downloaded, and most mentioned articles: medical specialty, publication type, country of origin, year of publication, and accessibility. There was only a 2.5% overlap in these three groups. Original articles were the more frequent among the most mentioned articles, whereas reviews, case reports, and guidelines/consensus statements were more frequent among the most downloaded articles. The most cited articles were more frequently published in 2010 and before, whereas the most downloaded articles were published in 2017−2018. The most mentioned articles were more frequently open-access articles, compared to the most downloaded articles. The most cited were more frequently older, the most downloaded were more frequently recent and educational, and the most mentioned were more frequently original and open-access articles. The results of our study may provide insights into various measures of article impact.

Bibliometric trending analysis of complications related to facial non-surgical aesthetic procedures: a retrospective study

“…Although there are disparities between the most cited and the most mentioned articles, 13 open access articles have a higher chance of being mentioned. The same correlation was not examined for the number of citations and open access.…”

Introducing the EMPIRE Index: A novel, value-based metric framework to measure the impact of medical publications

“…Nevertheless, an analysis of 640 highly-cited medical publications found that only 9% were also found in a list of 652 articles with the highest AAS (i.e. primarily social media and news mentions), suggesting distinct motivations for scholarly citing versus sharing across diverse audiences [ 22 ]. Mendeley saves require the reader to have access to the free-to use Mendeley reference manager platform, and so reflect useage among individuals who consume a lot of scholarly literature.…”

“…The AAS is only weakly correlated with the number of citations [ 20 , 21 ]. Among the most cited, downloaded, and mentioned articles published in general medical journals, only 2.5% were found in all three lists [ 22 ]. This implies that altmetrics cannot effectively be reduced to a single linear representation, and data reduction can, at best, provide several scores that group together related metrics.…”

Factors associated with high Altmetric Attention Score in dermatology research

“…Our study showed open access articles trend with high levels of social attention in terms of AAS (OR 3.2 [95% CI 1.6–6.7]; P = 0.002) (Table 1). It is possible that manuscripts widely available for public consumption increase in visibility through social media platforms, unlike those published in journals with paywalls 11,14 . In the current fast‐paced world, this format may fit the need to expeditiously disseminate information with a higher reader preference.…”