Untitled

Abstract

Background With the emergence and development of social media platforms, Altmetric score has been introduced as a quantitative measuring approach for online impact and exposure of research work. We aim to determine if Altmetric score correlates with the citation number of ar-ticles in specific major pediatric orthopaedic journals and analyze the characteristics of these publications further. Methods: The top 100 publications ranked by Altmetric score from four important pediatric orthopaedic journals were inspected. Pearson's correlation coefficients were performed by using GraphPad PRISM software to examine the correlation between Altmetric score and various factors including citation number, impact factor and impact index. Different aspects were analyzed to identify the characteristics of top articles. Results: A total of 100 publications were recorded and analyzed. There was no statistically significant correlation between citation number and Altmetric score (r=0.1027, p=0.3092, R2=0.0105), also no correlation was found between Alt-metric score and impact factor (r=0.0670, p=0.5079, R2=0.0045) or impact index (r=-0.1104, p=0.2768, R2=0.0122). Almost all the articles were focused on clinical studies in different types and topics. Only one publication discussed animal experiment. Conclusions: Altmetric score does not cor-relate with the traditional bibliometric factors including citation number, impact factor or impact index in specific major pediatric orthopaedic journal articles. However, Altmetric score provide large amount of online information, both Altmetric score and citation number should be con-sidered complementarity when assessing the impact of scientific publications in pediatric or-thopaedics.