Impact of COVID-19 Dentistry-Related Literature: An Altmetric Study

Scientific literature on COVID-19 has grown rapidly during the pandemic. The aim of this study was to provide a comprehensive overview of the popularity on the web of the available dental publications on COVID-19 and to examine associations amongst article characteristics, online mentions, and citations.

An Altmetric Explorer search was conducted for COVID-19 articles published in dental journals using 3 keywords: COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and pandemic. The following Altmetric data were collected: Altmetric attention score (AAS), mentions by news outlets, tweets, Mendeley readers, and Web of Science citations. Additionally, article title, type, topic, origin and open access status, journal title, quartile of impact factor (IF) distribution, and time lapse between COVID-19 pandemic onset and publication date were analysed.

In all, 253 articles published in 48 dental journals were eligible for the study. AAS was significantly influenced by article topic, type, origin, and journal IF quartile. There was a negligible correlation between AAS and Web of Science citations. Mendeley was the only Altmetric source highly correlated with citations.

There was substantial online interest in COVID-19 dentistry-related literature, as depicted by the AAS of the reviewed articles and social media metrics. Mendeley reader counts were highly correlated with citations, and they may therefore be valuable in research impact evaluation.