Correlation between the Altmetrics Attention Score (AAS) and the Citation Count (CC): A study based on highly cited breast cancer articles

Abstract

Measuring the impact of a research publication is a vital factor in the scholarly world. Citation count is a single dimension of measuring the impact of a scholarly publication. However, the evolution of the Internet has changed the ways of accessing research publications and research communication. As a result of the Internet, altmetric became a popular tool to measure the research impact. The objective of the article is to identify the correlations between Citation Count and Altmetrics Attention Score based on the top 100 highly cited articles available in the Web of Science database. The scholarly publications related to breast cancer published in 2014 were selected as the target population. Web of Science database was used to collect the bibliographic information and citation count of the highly cited articles. The keyword "Breast Cancer" was used in the 'title' field of WoS and the search was limited to open access journal articles. The search results were arranged according to the times cited from highest to lowest and ranked according to the citation count. The articles within the top 100 rankings according to the citation count were selected as the sample of this study. Altmetrics bookmarklet was used to collect the Altmetrics Attention Scores of the selected articles. Data were analyzed using SPSS 20 software and Microsoft Excel. Spearman's rank order correlation coefficient was used to determine the relationship between Citation Count and Altmetrics Attention Score. The study revealed that there is a positive correlation (r s = .552, p < 0.01) between the Citation Count and the Altmetrics Attention Score.