Retracted: "Assessing the Dissemination of COVID-19 Articles Across Social Media With Altmetric and PlumX Metrics: Correlational Study"

Abstract

Background The use of social media assists in the distribution of COVID-19 information to the general public and health professionals. Alternative-level metrics (ie, altmetrics) and PlumX metrics are new bibliometrics that can assess how many times a scientific article has been shared and how much a scientific article has spread within social media platforms. Objective Our objective was to characterize and compare the traditional bibliometrics (ie, citation count and impact factors) and new bibliometrics (ie, Altmetric Attention Score [AAS] and PlumX score) of the top 100 COVID-19 articles with the highest AASs. Methods The top 100 articles with highest AASs were identified with Altmetric Explorer in May 2020. The AASs, journal names, and the number of mentions in various social media databases of each article were collected. Citation counts and PlumX Field-Weighted Citation Impact scores were collected from the Scopus database. Additionally, AASs, PlumX scores, and citation counts were log-transformed and adjusted by +1 for linear regression, and Spearman correlation coefficients were used to determine correlations. Results The median AAS, PlumX score, and citation count were 4922.50, 37.92, and 24.00, respectively. The New England Journal of Medicine published the most articles (18/100, 18%). The highest number of mentions (985,429/1,022,975, 96.3%) were found on Twitter, making it the most frequently used social media platform. A positive correlation was observed between AAS and citation count (r2=0.0973; P=.002), and between PlumX score and citation count (r2=0.8911; P<.001). Conclusions Our study demonstrated that citation count weakly correlated with AASs and strongly correlated with PlumX scores, with regard to COVID-19 articles at this point in time. Altmetric and PlumX metrics should be used to complement traditional citation counts when assessing the dissemination and impact of a COVID-19 article.

Altmetrics and Citation Metrics as Complementary Indicators for Research Management

“…PlumX processes alternative parameters such as download counts, abstract views, comments on online platforms, socialmedia activities, as well as citations. It provides an insight into the public discussion of scholarly and other items [12,13]. Scientific products in PlumX are named as artifacts.…”

Discovering temporal scientometric knowledge in COVID-19 scholarly production

“…This virus has harmed the global economy and exhausted the health care system to a degree that has not been seen since the 1918 influenza outbreak (Tornberg et al 2021 ). Since its origin in Wuhan, China in December 2019, it has caused more fatalities than SARS-Cov and MERS-Cov together (Mahase 2020 ).…”

“…Since the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, many research communities and agencies dedicated their efforts to fight against this infectious disease with their own resources and means. One of these efforts was the sharing of coronavirus-related scientific research as openly as possible (Colavizza et al 2021 ; Grammes et al 2020 ; Tornberg et al 2021 ).…”

“…So, aiming to extract relevant insights from the large set of publications and to support decision making to fight against the current pandemic, several scientometric and bibliometric studies have been published for this purpose (Casado-Aranda et al 2021 ; Colavizza et al 2021 ; Farooq et al 2021 ; Gul et al 2020 ; Haghani et al 2020 ; Malik et al 2021 ; Okhovati and Arshadi 2021 ; Tornberg et al 2021 ; Zhang et al 2020 ). In other words, the recent scientific contributions confirm that the academic response to COVID-19 is both massive and multifaceted, i.e., these studies explore several scenarios and fields of research.…”

Social Media Metrics of Indian Covid-19 Research: An Altmetric Analysis

“…The Covid-19 related altmetric studies covers the topic corresponds to general studies, [5][6][7][8][9] top cited articles 10,11 and correlational studies. 12,13 These studies are related to assessment of impact over citation activities based on Dimensions database 6,9 of various social media tools such as Twitter. However, assessment of Indian publications is limited.…”