Analysis of Altmetrics Indicators of Scientific Outputs by Faculty Members of Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences in the Field of COVID-19

This study aims to monitor the scientific productions of the faculty members at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences (HUMS) during the COVID-19 pandemic indexed by Scopus using the citation and altmetrics indexes.

This is a descriptive-analytical study using a scientometric approach in 2023. The study population consists of the articles of the HUMS faculty members during the pandemic (2020-2022) indexed by Scopus. The search was conducted using the affiliation identifier form of the Scopus database with no restrictions on the type of study. The search yielded 956 articles (152 articles related to COVID-19). Altmetrics extension was used in Google Scholar search engine to check the status of works in social networks. Bibliographic information, citations and altmetrics index of the articles were entered in Excel software and then analyzed using descriptive and analytical methods in SPSS software, version 26.

The rate of attention paid to all articles and COVID-19-related articles was 90.27% and 46%, respectively. The attention was mostly paid by capture (68.89%), social media (8.8%) and view (8.4%), according to the altmetric indicators. There was a strong and positive correlation between the citation index and the altmetrics index of the COVID-19-related articles. These articles were mostly visible on Mendeley, followed by Twitter and Facebook.

Information about the visibility of articles in different social networks along with the number of citations can lead to efficient competition among faculty members in social networks.