An analysis of the top 500 anesthesiology publications with the highest altmetric attention scores

Altmetrics is a web-based measurement method that assesses the online dissemination and interactions of an article. We performed an altmetric analysis of 500 papers with the highest altmetric attention score (AAS) published in anesthesiology-related journals. Journals were identified from the Web of Science (WoS) Master Journal List by Clarivate using the category "Anesthesiology." The altmetric data were obtained from the Altmetric Explorer database. The first 500 publications with the highest AAS scores among these journals were identified and analyzed. Using Spearman correlation, no correlation was observed between the AAS and either WoS or Google Scholar citations (R = 0.188, P < .001 and R = 0.161, P < .001, respectively). There was a weak correlation between blog mentions and both WoS citations and Google Scholar citations (R = 0.263, P < .001 and (R = 0.241, P < .001). A very strong correlation was observed between the number of Mendeley readers and both WoS and Google Scholar citations (R = 0.889, P < .001 and R = 0.905, P < .001). A significant difference in AAS and WoS citations was observed based on publication topic (P = .036 and P = .005, respectively), with algology being the most common topic (n = 206, 41.2%). Although AAS did not significantly affect traditional scientific citations, the analysis of subgroup correlations revealed notable differences. Our results suggest that traditional scientific citations (WoS and Google Scholar citations) are strongly influenced by the number of Mendeley readers. Further research is needed to understand these dynamics in academic discourse.