Altmetric analysis of 2015 dental literature: a cross sectional survey

Introduction To report and analyse Altmetric data of all dental articles and journals in 2015.Methods To identify all 2015 dental articles, PubMed was searched via Altmetric platform using the following query: ("2015/1/1"[PDAT]: "2015/12/31"[PDAT]) AND jsubsetd[text] NOT 2016[PDAT] on November 12, 2016. Altmetric data of all 2015 dental articles and journals were extracted and analysed by Microsoft Office Excel 2016 using descriptive statistics, graphs and trend-line analysis. To find the most important and influential Altmetric factors, multi-layered perceptron artificial neural network was employed using SPSS 22.Results A total of 14,884 dental articles published in 2015 using PubMed database were found, from which 5,153 (34.62%) articles had an Altmetric score. The mean Altmetric score was 2.94 ± 9.2 (95% C.I:2.703.22). Mendeley readers (73.19%), Twitter (21.48%), Facebook walls (3.67%), news outlets (0.69%) and bloggers (0.57%) were the most popular Altmetric data resources. At journal level, 147 dental journals with valid Altmetric data were included in the study. The British Dental Journal had the first rank, followed by Journal of Dental Research, Journal of Clinical Periodontology and Journal of the American Dental Association. Sensitivity analysis showed news outlets, tweeters and scientific bloggers were the most important and influential Altmetric data resources.Discussion In comparison with all science subjects and medical and health sciences, 2015 Altmetric scores in dentistry were very low. Uses of new and emerging scholarly tools such as social media, scientific blogs and post-publication peer-review were not common in the dental science. This negligence may be due to lack of knowledge and attitude. An Altmetric score is dynamic and may fluctuate over time.