Abstract
Recent literature has demonstrated the associations between social media attention, as measured by altmetric attention score (AAS), and higher citation rates across medical disciplines. Despite increasing use of AAS, an understanding of factors associated with higher AAS and social media attention remains lacking. Furthermore, if this increased attention correlates with a higher methodological quality and lower biases has not been determined. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to determine the relationship between methodological quality, study biases and the AAS in randomized controlled trials (RCTs). All RCTs from 2016 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Journal of the American Medical Society (JAMA), and Lancet were extracted and the (1) AAS; (2) Methodological Bias (JADAD Scale); Study Bias (Cochrane Risk-of-Bias tool for RCTs) recorded. A total of 296 RCTs with a median (range) AAS and citation rate per article of 234.0(7–4079) and 165.0(4–3257), respectively, were included. The AAS was positively associated with citation rate (β 0.19, 95% CI 0.10–0.29; P < 0.001). Methodological bias was not associated with the AAS (β − 36.3, 95% CI − 83.5–10.9; P = 0.131), but was negatively associated with higher citation rates (β − 66.4, 95% CI − 106.0 to − 26.9; P = 0.001). The number of study biases was not associated with the AAS (β 43.7, 95% CI − 6.3–93.7;P = 0.086), but was positively associated with a higher citation rate (β 64.5, 95% CI 22.4–106.6; P = 0.003). The online attention of RCTs in medical journals was not necessarily reflective of high methodological quality and minimal study biases, but was associated with higher citation rates. Researchers and clinicians should critically examine each article despite the amount of online attention an article receives as the AAS does not necessarily reflect article quality.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Seglen PO (1997) Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. BMJ 314:497
Wang J, Alotaibi NM, Ibrahim GM, Kulkarni AV, Lozano AM (2017) The spectrum of altmetrics in neurosurgery: the top 100 “Trending” articles in neurosurgical journals. World Neurosurg 103:883-895.e881
Pulido CM, Redondo-Sama G, Sordé-Martí T, Flecha R (2018) Social impact in social media: a new method to evaluate the social impact of research. PLoS ONE 13:e0203117
Barakat AF, Nimri N, Shokr M et al (2018) Correlation of altmetric attention score with article citations in cardiovascular research. J Am Coll Cardiol 72:952–953
Punia V, Aggarwal V, Honomichl R, Rayi A (2019) Comparison of attention for neurological research on social media vs academia: an altmetric score analysis. JAMA Neurol. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2019.1791
Parrish JM, Jenkins NW, Brundage TS, Hrynewycz NM, Singh K (2020) The top 100 spine surgery articles on social media: an altmetric study. Spine (Phila Pa 1976). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spinee.2020.05.458
Kunze KN, Polce EM, Vadhera A et al (2020) What Is the Predictive ability and academic impact of the altmetrics score and social media attention? Am J Sports Med 48:1056–1062
Altmetrics. Attention Sources coverage dates. Last modified Sep 2021. Available at https://help.altmetric.com/support/solutions/articles/6000240455-attention-sources-coverage-dates. Accessed April 21, 2021
Altmetrics. How is the Altmetric Attention Score calculated? Last modified Sep 2021. Available at https://help.altmetric.com/support/solutions/articles/6000233311-how-is-the-altmetric-attention-score-calculated-. Accessed April 21, 2021.21
Chaimani A, Salanti G, Leucht S, Geddes JR, Cipriani A (2017) Common pitfalls and mistakes in the set-up, analysis and interpretation of results in network meta-analysis: what clinicians should look for in a published article. Evid Based Ment Health 20:88–94
Altman DG (2002) Poor-quality medical research: what can journals do? JAMA 287:2765–2767
Boissel JP (1989) Impact of randomized clinical trials on medical practices. Control Clin Trials 10:120S-134S
Nwachukwu BU, Kahlenberg CA, Lehman JD, Lyman S, Marx RG (2017) Characteristics of orthopedic publications in high-impact general medical journals. Orthopedics 40:e405–e412
Aksnes D, Langfeldt L, Wouters P (2019) Citations, citation indicators, and research quality: an overview of basic concepts and theories. SAGE Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019829575
Hook D, Porter S, Herzog C (2018) Dimensions: building context for search and evaluation. Front Res Metr Anal. https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2018.00023
Polce E, Kunze KN, Farivar D, Fu MC, Nwachukwu BU, Nho SJ, Chahla J (2020) Orthopedic randomized controlled trials published in general medical journals are associated with higher altmetric attention scores and social media attention. Arthrosc J Arthrosc Relat Surg. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arthro.2020.09.015
Jadad AR, Moore RA, Carroll D et al (1996) Assessing the quality of reports of randomized clinical trials: is blinding necessary? Control Clin Trials 17:1–12
Olivo SA, Macedo LG, Gadotti IC, Fuentes J, Stanton T, Magee DJ (2008) Scales to assess the quality of randomized controlled trials: a systematic review. Phys Ther 88:156–175
Higgins JP, Altman DG, Gotzsche PC et al (2011) The Cochrane Collaboration’s tool for assessing risk of bias in randomised trials. BMJ 343:D5928
Farrah K, Young K, Tunis MC, Zhao L (2019) Risk of bias tools in systematic reviews of health interventions: an analysis of PROSPERO-registered protocols. Syst Rev 8:280
Higgins JPT, Thomas J, Chandler J, Cumpston M, Li T, Page MJ, Welch VA (editors). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions version 6.2 (updated February 2021). Cochrane, 2021. Available from www.training.cochrane.org/handbook.
Sathianathen NJ, Lane Iii R, Murphy DG et al (2020) Social media coverage of scientific articles immediately after publication predicts subsequent citations—#SoME_Impact score: observational analysis. J Med Internet Res 22:e12288
Luc JGY, Percy E, Hirji S et al (2020) Predictors of high impact articles in the annals of thoracic surgery. Ann Thorac Surg. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.athoracsur.2020.04.102
Ladeiras-Lopes R, Clarke S, Vidal-Perez R et al (2020) Twitter promotion predicts citation rates of cardiovascular articles: a preliminary analysis from the ESC Journals Randomized Study. Eur Heart J. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehaa211
Chang J, Desai N, Gosain A (2019) Correlation between altmetric score and citations in pediatric surgery core journals. J Surg Res 243:52–58
Haustein S, Bowman TD, Holmberg K, Tsou A, Sugimoto CR, Larivière V (2016) Tweets as impact indicators: examining the implications of automated “bot” accounts on Twitter. J Assoc Inf Sci Technol 67:232–238
Ruano J, Aguilar-Luque M, Gomez-Garcia F et al (2018) The differential impact of scientific quality, bibliometric factors, and social media activity on the influence of systematic reviews and meta-analyses about psoriasis. PLoS ONE 13:e0191124
Bornmann L, Marx W (2016) The journal Impact Factor and alternative metrics: a variety of bibliometric measures has been developed to supplant the impact factor to better assess the impact of individual research papers. EMBO Rep 17:1094–1097
Bornmann L, Haunschild R (2018) Do altmetrics correlate with the quality of papers? A large-scale empirical study based on F1000Prime data. PLoS ONE 13:e0197133
Zahedi Z, Haustein S (2018) On the relationships between bibliographic characteristics of scientific documents and citation and Mendeley readership counts: a large-scale analysis of Web of Science publications. J Informet 12:191–202
Didegah F, Bowman TD, Holmberg K (2018) On the differences between citations and altmetrics: an investigation of factors driving altmetrics versus citations for finnish articles. J Am Soc Inf Sci 69:832–843
Holmberg K, Vainio J (2018) Why do some research articles receive more online attention and higher altmetrics? Reasons for online success according to the authors. Scientometrics 116:435–447
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors report no conflicts of interest related to the current work.
Ethical approval
The current study uses publicaly available data and was exempt from formal ethical approval. Human and animal rights: No human or animal subjects were directly implicated in the current study. Informed consent: Informed consent was not required as this was a review of publicaly available information.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kunze, K.N., Manzi, J.E., Polce, E.M. et al. High social media attention scores are not reflective of study quality: an altmetrics-based content analysis. Intern Emerg Med 17, 1363–1374 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11739-022-02939-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11739-022-02939-5