The online attention to certain nuclear medicine topics: An altmetrics study vs. a citation analysis

Introduction: Traditional citation analysis has been greatly criticized because the process of citation accumulation requires considerable time after publication. So, the term “altmetrics” was proposed in 2010 to measure the scientific and social impact of a paper.We performed a search for certain nuclear medicine topics using the altmetrics approach to report the correlation between the altmetrics index and the number of citations. Methods: In this descriptive-analytical study, we retrieved the articles entitled with a few nuclear medicine keywords that published from 2010 to 2019 in the Web of Science (WoS). The number of 730 original papers included in this study. Altmetrics data were derived via an altmetrics bookmarklet. Statistical analysis was performed to measure the correlation between the altmetrics score and the citation count of nuclear medicine papers. Results: Mendeley and Twitter had the highest score of attention on social media platforms. Demographic information revealed that the most number of tweets and Mendeley's attention in nuclear medicine belonged to the United States (US). Moreover, researchers had the highest rate of shares in Mendeley. The correlation between the altmetrics score and citation index was significant (p <0.05). Conclusion: The authors have to pay more attention to social activities on the web for wide dissemination and proper evaluation of their scientific publications.