Representation and trend analysis of the world's top altmetrics papers

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to represent and analyze the trend of the world's top altmetrics papers. This study is an applied research and it was carried out using altmetrics and scientometrics methods. The research community includes 800 top articles from the altmetrics aspect (published in the period from 2013 to 2020). In order to collect data, a list of the top papers along with their altmetrics data were extracted from the Altmetrics Institute website. In order to determine the citation status of the papers, their subject areas and the participating countries in writing these outputs, the Web of Science database was used. Also, SPSS version 22 software and Spearman's correlation test were used to investigate the relationship between the altmetrics performance of the studied articles and the number of their citations in the database. The results of the research showed that 45% of the top papers were published in the field of multidisciplinary sciences and 24% of them were published in the field of medical sciences. Important and core journals in writing the top papers are Nature (with 105 articles), followed by Science journals (with 74 articles). America has published more than half of the top altmetrics papers in the world (50.5%). After that, England has the second place in the world with about 15.62% of the share of top papers. Among the media, Twitter (with an average attendance of 237,441/62), News Outlets(15,319/57) and then Mendeley (20,248/6) were ranked first to third, and the articles in these media were more popular with the society. The trend of these media has always been increasing during the studied years. In the meantime, Facebook is the only media that has had a declining trend since 2017 and the number of top papers has decreased significantly compared to before. Also, there is a significant and weak relationship between the altmetrics score and the number of citations of top papers. Using the features of the collection of the top published papers from the perspective of subject areas, important and core journals, geographical distribution, and comparing the number of citations of these articles with the number of their readers in social media, will help the policymakers of the research fields and researchers to make more accurate short-term and long-term policies on conduct scientific research and increase the visibility and effectiveness of researchers' scientific outputs, especially in terms of altmetrics indexes.

Keywords

• top altmetrics papers
• web of science database
• trend analysis
• social media
• visibility