Dedicated COVID-19 Resource Center in Radiology Journals: Its Citation Metrics and Altmetrics Impact

Since the emergence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), several journals have established a dedicated resource center for all the articles published on COVID-19. Our study compared the altmetric impact captured by articles published in journals having a COVID-19 resource center.

We used the Web of Science database to assess radiology journals publishing the most common articles on COVID-19. We used the dimensions database to assess citations received and altmetric attention score for each article. For each article, we extracted several citations received and altmetric attention scores. To account for the variation in strength and exposure between included journals, we adopted a normalization strategy and regression analysis in our statistical analysis.

A total of 494 articles were included in the current assessment, including 334 (67.6%) articles published in journals with the dedicated COVID-19 resource center, including European radiology, American Journal of Roentgenology, Radiology, and Journal of the American college of radiology, while European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Academic Radiology did not have COVID-19 resource center. Journals with COVID-19 resource center had a mean normalized altmetric attention score of 0.38 higher (95% CI 0.25 to 0.50; p< 0.001) and a mean normalized citation count of 6.73 higher (95% CI 3.99 to 9.48; p< 0.001) than those without COVID-19 resource center.

Radiology journals that provided COVID-19 articles in a dedicated resource center within its homepage had greater attention and higher citation for their COVID-19 articles than journals that did not have such a dedicated resource center.