Social attention and scientific articles on stroke: Altmetric analysis of top-50 articles

It is well known that social media influences politics and the economy. A new Web-based metric (Altmetrics) has recently been developed for use in scientific fields. The aim of this study was to determine which recent papers in the field of stroke have received the greatest amount of attention from the general public. The Altmetric Attention Score is an automatically calculated metric for monitoring social media.

An Altmetric Explorer search was performed on May 25, 2018 to extract the following information: (i) journal name, (ii) journal impact factor (IF), (iii) year of publication, (iv) article topic, (v) article type, and (vi) stroke subtype.

The journal that published articles that received the most attention on social media was Stroke (n = 16). Articles with higher IFs are not expected to receive greater attention on social media. Twenty-one of the identified articles related to the subtypes of ischemic stroke. Regarding contents, approximately half of the top-10 ranked articles were about modifiable risk factors, especially diet and physical activities. Two recent articles on the extension of mechanical thrombectomy after 6 h were included on this list.

There are some discrepancies in perspectives between scientific articles and general social media, and the Altmetric Attention Score is considered to more dynamically reflect the interests of the general public. We therefore suggest that physicians can use Altmetric analysis to identify what the general public actually wants to know about in the real world, while they should also have a critical view of the social media that attracts the public with a stimulating theme rather than a worthy subject.