Table 2.
Characteristics of correlational studies of very good quality (n=7).
| Study ID and reference | Health research area/unit and period of analysis | Metrics reported | Results | Methodological quality indicatorsa | |||
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1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| Costas, 2015 [61] | Biomedical and health sciences; 217,115 articles in health sciences available from WoSb (2011-2013) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (WoSb) | Positive relationship between number of Altmetrics and the average citation impact and citation scores | + | + | + | + |
| Delli, 2017 [64] | Dental medicine; 100 articles with highest AASc from Altmetric Explorer and JCRd (2015) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (Scopus) | No significant correlation between Altmetrics and citations | + | + | + | + |
| Eysenbach, 2011 [17] | Medical informatics; 208 tweets including links to 286 JMIRe articles (2008-2010) | Social media: Twitter-Bibliometrics: Citations (Google Scholar and Scopus) | Moderate correlations | + | ++ | + | ++ |
| Haustein, 2014 [16] | Biomedical and health sciences; 1,431,576 biomedical and health sciences articles available on PubMed (2010-2012) | Social media: Twitter; Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (WoSb) | Moderate correlations | + | + | + | + |
| Knight, 2014 [35,36] | Organ transplantation; 6979 articles with citation data available; 1346 with social media mention (2011-2012) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (Scopus) | Significant correlations between social media mentions and citations | + | + | + | + |
| Livas, 2018 [71] | Orthodontics; Top 200 articles in orthodontics available from Altmetrics Explorer (2017) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (Scopus) | No correlation was observed between Altmetrics score and citations | + | + | + | + |
| Maggio, 2018 [72] | Health profession education; 2486 articles with Altmetrics published in health profession education (2013-2015) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (WoSb) | Significant correlations between Altmetrics and bibliometrics, but moderate effects | + | + | + | + |
a1: appropriately adjusting for time of the social media metric (+); 2: appropriately adjusting for confounders such as article type (+) and seasonality/time factors (++); 3: appropriately exploring correlations by including scatterplots (+); 4: appropriately reporting nonlinear correlations tests and statistics (+) as well as log-linear relationship tests (++).
bWoS: Web of Science.
cAAS: Altmetrics attention score.
dJCR: Journal Citation Reports.
eJMIR: Journal of Medical Internet Research.