Table 6.
Characteristics of correlational studies of very poor 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 |
| Araujo, 2017 [53] | Parkinson disease research; Top 20 articles with highest AASb appearing on the Journal of Parkinson's Disease (2013-2016) | Social media: Twitter, Facebook, Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (Scopus) | Qualitative summary in support of correlation | − | − | − | − |
| Heydarpour, 2017 [43] | Multiple sclerosis research; 4693 articles on multiple sclerosis retrieved from Altmetric Explorer and PubMed (2016) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (WoSc) | Moderate correlations between AASb and citations | − | − | − | − |
| Matava, 2017 [45] | Pediatric anesthesiology; Top 100 articles on pediatric anesthesiology available from Altmetrics Explorer (2016) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (Scopus) | No significant correlation between Altmetrics or Twitter mentions and Citations; The number of Mendeley mentions was significantly associated with citations | − | − | − | − |
| Ramezani-Pakpour-Langeroudi, 2018 [75] | Clinical medicine; 55 highly cited articles on Thomson Reuters' Essential Science Indicator (2015) | Social media: ResearchGate, Mendeley, Academia, LinkedIn-Bibliometrics: Citations (Scopus) | A positive direct relationship was observed between visibility at social networking sites with citation and h‐index rate | − | − | − | − |
| Ruan, 2018 [77] | Plastic and reconstructive surgery; 55 most-cited articles published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (2014-2015) | Social media: Altmetrics, Mendeley-Bibliometrics: Citations (Scopus) | No significant correlation between Altmetrics and citations; The number of Mendeley mentions was significantly associated with citations | − | − | − | − |
| Smith, 2019 [80] | Gastrointestinal endoscopy; 2361 original research articles published in Gastrointestinal Endoscopy of which 2050 were cited at least once (2010-2016) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Citations (Scopus) | Significant correlations between tweets and citations | − | − | − | − |
| Wiehn, 2017 [83] | Medical sciences; 36 Shire-sponsored articles (2016) | Social media: Altmetrics-Bibliometrics: Article downloads and IFd | No correlation was observed between Altmetrics score and IFd, downloads | − | − | − | − |
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 (++).
bAAS: Altmetrics attention score.
cWoS: Web of Science.
dIF: impact factor.