Table 4.
Characteristics of correlational studies of fair quality (n=10).
| 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 |
| Araujo, 2018 [54] | Physiotherapy; 200 randomly selected articles from physiotherapy evidence database (PEDro; 2013-2016) | Social media: Altmetrics mentioned/reader-Bibliometrics: Citations (WoSb) | Significant correlation with citations | + | + | − | − |
| Calopedos, 2017 [58] | Urology; 22 urology articles in English language identified via PubMed (2010-2015) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (Google Scholar) | Significant correlation between Altmetrics and citations | + | − | + | − |
| Chang, 2019 [59] | Pediatric surgery; 140 articles appearing on 14 core journals on pediatric surgery (2012-2015) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (Scopus); IFc (JCRd) | Strong correlations between Altmetric scores and citations, but not IFc | + | − | + | − |
| Dardas, 2019 [63] | Nursing; 100 articles in nursing with highest AASe from WoSb (2012-2018) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (WoSb and Scopus) | Significant moderate correlation between Altmetrics and citation counts | − | + | + | − |
| Hassona, 2019 [65] | Dental medicine; 100 articles with highest AASe from Altmetric Explorer (2018) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (Google Scholar and Scopus) | No significant correlation between Altmetrics and citations | − | + | − | + |
| Liu, 2013 [70] | Field not specified; 33,128 articles appearing in PLOS One (2011) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: HTML views, PDF downloads, and citations (Scopus, PubMed, and CrossRef) | Significant correlations between Altmetrics and bibliometrics | − | − | + | + |
| Nolte, 2019 [37,38] | Urology; 44 articles tweeted about the 2015 American Urological Association meeting (2015) | Social media: Twitter-Bibliometrics: IFc | Positive significant correlation with subsequent publication IFc within 18 months of presentation | − | + | + | − |
| Punia, 2019 [73] | Neurological research; Top 100 articles from top 5 neurology journals (2016) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations | Weak positive correlation between Altmetric score and citations | − | − | + | + |
| Quintana, 2016 [74] | Psychiatry; 438 articles in the American Journal of Psychiatry (2013-2015) | Social media: Twitter-Bibliometrics: Citations (WoSb) | Positive correlation between Twitter mentions and citations | + | − | − | ++ |
| Ruano, 2018 [25] | Psoriasis research; 164 systematic reviews or meta-analyses available from MEDLINEf, EMBASEg, and Cochrane databases (2016) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (Google Scholar) | No significant correlation between Altmetrics and citations; The number of Mendeley readers was significantly associated with citations | − | + | + | − |
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.
cIF: impact factor.
dJCR: Journal Citation Reports.
eAAS: Altmetrics attention score.
fMEDLINE: Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online.
gEMBASE: Excerpta Medica database.