Altmetric vs. Citations: An In-Depth Analysis of Top-tier Cancer Research

In this study, we aimed to comprehensively analyze the altmetric indices of 1000 highly cited articles in the field of cancer, considering the growing importance of social media-based indicators as complementary tools alongside traditional bibliometric indicators for evaluating scientific outputs. Cancer research is a critical area in the medical community, being the second leading cause of death after cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Conducted as a cross-sectional descriptive study, the bibliographic information of the research sample was obtained from the Scopus citation database. Data about the social media presence and altmetric attention scores (AAS) of each article were collected from the journal and altmetric.com. Subsequently, Excel and SPSS software were employed for analysis. Among the reviewed articles, 96.3% were shared on social media at least once, with Mendeley (99.6%), Patents (86.3%), and CiteULike (66.3%) being the most commonly used altmetric sources. The article titled "Dermatologist-level classification of skin cancer with deep neural networks," published in the Nature journal, obtained the highest AAS of 2864. Additionally, the majority of tweeters and readers were from the USA. Tweeters were predominantly members of the public, while readers were primarily professionals in medicine and dentistry, including PhD students. Spearman tests indicated a statistically significant moderate correlation between AASs and citations (r= 0.283, p-value< 0.001). Similarly, a significant weak correlation was observed between the journals' Impact Factor (IF) (r= 0.217) and CiteScore (r= 0.133) with the number of citations (p-value < 0.001). The findings of this study emphasize the positive impact of social media-based indicators on the number of citations received by scientific articles, making them valuable complementary measures alongside traditional citation indicators for evaluating research impact. We recommend that journals, authors, and researchers actively use social media platforms to enhance the visibility of their work and attract more citations.