The Articles Published in Web of Science by Middle Eastern Researchers in Waterpipe/Cigarette Smoking: An Altmetrics Study

Abstract

Policymakers and experts should trust health studies. On the other hand, it should be considered by the general public. Altmetrics, as a new method, seeks to examine the social effects of researchers' scientific outputs along with citation analysis indices. The present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the articles published by researchers in the field of waterpipe/cigarette smoking on the Web of Science database during 2010-2019. This paper is a descriptive-analytical study with a correlational approach in the citation analyses using the Altmetrics index. The statistical population consists of papers on waterpipe/cigarette smoking by Middle Eastern researchers during 2010-2019 published on the Web of Science. The data is extracted using the Altmetrics Bookmarklet and analyzed it by excel and SPSS.From the total number of scientific articles in the field of waterpipe/cigarette smoking by Middle Eastern researchers during the research period, 1,086 articles were indexed on the Web of Science, and only 2% of them had no Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) or PubMed Identifiers (PMID); on the contrary, 50% of the articles had Altmetrics scores. Among the social networks cited by the researchers of the Middle Eastern countries in the field of waterpipe/cigarette smoking, the shares of social networks, namely Dimensions, Mendeley, and Twitter, were the most. The most significant number of citations of the articles on Mendeley and Twitter belonged to U.S. and U.K. users. Also, medicine and dentistry had the highest number of Mendeley citations. The correlation coefficient between the altmetrics score and citation index was poor but significant (R=0.32, P <0.05). The publication of research papers on the social web (i.e., social networks) increases the visibility of the documents and makes them visible to a broad audience. This is effective in the future of citations of articles on citation databases. This further increases the qualitative performance indices of the papers by receiving more citations.https://dorl.net/dor/20.1001.1.20088302.2022.20.4.7.6

Keywords

• mendeley, twitter, web of science, altmetrics, the middle east, smoking.