Effects of Altmetrics on Field-Weighted Citation Impact: A Case Study of Iranian Researchers’ Osteoporosis Articles

Altmetrics enable monitoring, tracking, and evaluating the role of authors and scientific and research publications in line with citations. Therefore, the present study aimed to determine the effects of altmetrics on Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) of articles published about osteoporosis by Iranian researchers and indexed in Scopus during 2008-2017 This study was a descriptive survey and the research population included all the articles on osteoporosis, as a keyword by affiliated authors of Iran, indexed in Scopus during 2008-2017. Based on the initial search, 512 articles were retrieved on February 25, 2018. In addition, the cut-off point was set to six, implying that all the articles with more than six citations were selected as samples. In this regard, 114 articles received at least six citations, and the FWCI for each of these articles was separately extracted from the Scopus database. Subsequently, PlumX data for these articles were manually extracted in five categories of Usage, Captures, Mentions, social media, and Citations. Finally, these data were analyzed using the statistical software R, version 3.3.1. Among the examined categories, Usage with the highest mean (216.482 ±468.081) was significantly different from the other categories. However, mentions (13.271±23.478) was least welcomed by users. Besides, among the studied metrics, ‘Exports-Saves’ (p=0.022), ‘Citation Indexes’ in CrossRef (p=0.041), ‘Time’ (p>0.001), and ‘Citation Indexes’ in Scopus (p>0.001) had a positive and significant correlation with FWCI. In general, the average FWCI increased by an increase in ‘Citation Indexes’ (in Scopus and CrossRef), ‘Exports-Saves’, and publication time. Therefore, it is recommended that universities, institutes, and research centers be made aware of the importance of researchers’ presence and membership in social networks. This increases the visibility of their research, and thus they can receive enough feedback to evaluate their works.