Altmetric analysis of the most mentioned articles online in the orthopaedic literature

Social media has become a valuable tool for the distribution of scientific content. This investigation examined the most mentioned articles in orthopaedics and identified factors concurrent with greater dissemination. Altmetric Attention Score (AAS), which measures the online attention of an article, was examined for 88,683 publications in the top 50 orthopaedic journals by 2021 impact factor. Comparative and correlational analyses were completed. Overall, average AAS and citation count of the 100 most mentioned articles were 606.7 (SD ± 272.0) and 67.55 (SD ± 98.01), respectively. These articles had primarily male first authors (75%), were produced predominantly in the United States (60%), concerned the subspecialty of sports medicine (28%), and were cross-sectional analyses (22%). There were significant differences in AAS between publications (p < 0.05) by the degree of collaboration and the type of article. Such insights can guide authors when considering avenues to increase the impact of their research.