مدیریت اطلاعات سلامت (Jul 2020)
An Altmetric Study of Medical Informatics and Health Information Management Articles in Social Media
Abstract
Introduction: Altmetrics (Alternative Indicators) are indicators which can be exploited alongside traditional scientometric concepts based on the citation analysis to examine the impact of scientific products on the Web 2.0 environment. The purpose of this study is to investigate the prevalence of international articles in the field of medical informatics and health information management (HIM) in social media and to determine the level of use of researchers from these media, in addition to identifying top articles based on Altmetrics scores. Methods: The present study was conducted with a scientometric approach using Altmetric indicators. The research population consisted of 64 journals in the field of HIM and medical informatics indexed at the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) and Scopus databases. All the necessary information about the journals and articles, such as the name of the journal, the name of the article, the altimetric score, etc. was obtained by referring to the Altmetric.com website. Spearman correlation test was used to analyze the data. Results: Mendeley, Twitter, and Facebook were among the social media that received the most mentions. The findings indicated that there was a significant relationship between altmetrics coverage (presence in social web environment) and three quality performance indices (SJR, snipe, and site score). The correlation coefficients obtained for these three indices were 0.401, 0.248, and 0.285, respectively. Conclusion: Social media can have a positive effect on the citation rate of scientific articles. Therefore, researchers in the field of medical informatics and HIM can increase the number of citations by sharing their works on social media. Due to the lack of strong correlation in this study, altmetrics can be used to complement scientometrics indices, but not as an alternative to evaluating scientific research.
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