Representation and Analysis of the Status of Indexed Articles of Researchers in Bushehr University of Medical Sciences at the Scopus Database in Social Networks: An Altmetrics Study

Background: As social networks are increasingly used, the research published through social networks should be evaluated. Hence, new measures were employed to examine the scientific effectiveness of social networks. The measurements taken from social networks, called Altmetrics, provide an opportunity to evaluate research. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the presence of indexed articles of researchers affiliated with Bushehr University of Medical Sciences at the Scopus site in social networks. Materials and Methods: The present applied study used altmetrics to determine articles with the highest altmetrics score. Data was collected form June 22nd to August 23rd, 2018 from Scopus database, and analyzed using descriptive and analytic statistics (Pearson’s correlation coefficient) in Excel and SPSS version 20. Results: The findings of this study showed that out of 679 articles incexed for Bushehr University of Medical Sciences in Scopus database, 128 articles in social networks had altmetrics score in different social networks. The study of various networks showed that Mendely (79.79%), Twitter (8.58%) and Dimensions (6.86%) were the most important social networks that users visited or shared through the research articles. Finally, we found a positive and significant relationship between altmetrics and citation indicators of articles, Conclusion: It can be said that altmetrics can be used as a complement to citation indicators to evaluate the performance of researchers.