Citations are Only Weakly to Moderately Correlated with Social Media and Online Attention in Hip and Knee Arthroplasty Database Publications
Keywords:
Arthroplasty research, Altmetrics, X posts, BibliometricsAbstract
Objectives: Citations remain an important way to measure the impact of published research. However, social media provides the opportunity to assess an article’s engagement more rapidly. It is unclear if these metrics are redundant or serve complementary roles in assessing an article’s impact. This study sought to identify the correlation between a study’s citations and both its Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) and number of X posts.
Design: Retrospective study.
Setting: Articles published in the orthopedic literature.
Article Selection: A total of 116 hip and knee arthroplasty articles utilizing administrative databases or clinical registries published in 2020 in four orthopaedic journals with social media accounts were studied.
Intervention: None.
Main Outcome Measurements: AAS, X posts, and citations for each article were extracted. Correlations between citations with both AAS and X posts were determined using Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r) for the entire sample and each individual journal.
Results: For the entire sample, there were statistically significant (p < 0.001) weakly to moderately positive correlations (r = 0.363, r = 0.410) between citations to X posts and AAS, respectively. Only articles published in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research (n = 16) demonstrated a statistically significant (p < 0.001) strongly positive correlation (r = 0.872, r = 0.878) between citations and AAS and X posts, respectively.
Conclusions: Citations are weakly to moderately correlated with X posts and AAS, with correlation strengths varying across journals. These metrics appear to serve complementary roles in measuring an article’s impact; authors and journals should consider both to assess the overall interest in a study.
Level of Evidence: Level V.
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