Does Altmetric Attention Score of Articles on Diabetes Mellitus Correlate with their Citations in Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science and Dimensions?

This applied altmetric study aimed to analyze the presence of highly-cited documents on diabetes mellitus in online social media and correlate their altmetric attention scores with their received citation counts. Twenty thousand highly-cited documents on diabetes mellitus were identified in Scopus and their altmetric attention scores (ASSs) were extracted from Altmetric Explorer (Altmetric LLP, London, UK). Received citation rates of the documents were extracted from Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science and Dimensions. Excell 2016 and SPSS 22 were used for data statistical description and analysis. Out of 19,383 DOI-owner highly-cited documents on diabetes mellitus, 16,076 (82.94%) were shared at least once in social media and had an altmetric attention score. Mendeley ranked first in sharing documents with 16,868 documents (87.02%). Six hundred forty-six thousand one hundred eighty-four tweets were tweeted on the studied documents from 222 countries, with the United States as first-ranked country (17,453 tweets, 18.2%). The highest-mentioned journal was the Lancet, and the highest-mentioned research institute was Harvard University. A significantly positive correlation was found between the altmetric attention scores of the studied documents and their citation counts in Google scholar (r= .842, p<.01), Scopus (r=.855, p<.01), Web of Science (r=.709, p<.05) and Dimensions (r= .841, p< .01). Regarding the central role of presence in social media in increasing the visibility and citability of documents, researchers must use the potentiality of social media and Web 2 tools for more sharing their scientific works and increasing the influence of their research output. In this study the relationship between the presence of documents in online social media and tools and their received citation rates was investigated in a large sample (20,000 diabetes mellitus documents). The results benefit researchers and research administrators for sharing and publicizing research output in social media.