Amr Barakat, MBBCh
Social media outlets, particularly Twitter, have gained interest among the cardiovascular community as a modality for dissemination of cardiovascular research. Online attention scores have emerged as a tool to assess the performance of scholarly articles on Web-based media and social networks. The Altmetric attention score (AAS), a commonly used online attention score, is widely adopted by cardiology journals, providing an objective reflection on how well an article is trending on online platforms. To explore the relationship between AAS and article citations (as a more conventional scholarly metric), we examined 939 original cardiovascular research articles published in 2014 in the 8 highest impact-factor General Internal Medicine and Cardiology journals, and collected AAS and 3-year total citation counts (2015-2017) for each article. Our analysis showed that the online attention as measured by AAS seemed to have a moderate correlation with citation counts at 3 years. The correlation was strong when only clinical trials or meta-analyses were evaluated. Our findings show that social media engagement may have positive academic impact on cardiovascular research, and should encourage academic cardiologists to promote their research on social media and other online platforms.
Barakat AF, Nimri N, Shokr M, Mahtta D, Mansoor H, Mojadidi MK, Mahmoud AN, Senussi M, Masri A, Elgendy IY. Correlation of Altmetric Attention Score With Article Citations in Cardiovascular Research. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2018 Aug 21; 72(8):952-953. doi: 10.1016/j.jacc.2018.05.062.