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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.