The status of geographical and demographic breakdown of scholarly communication of Iranian biomedical journal articles in social media: an altmetric study

Abstract

Abstract Introduction: One of the main goals of science production is productivity that is measured by the number of the usage, mentions and citations, and indicates that results of researches has been used in order to create change, improvement and reproduction in science and life. Altmetrics is one of the new approaches that evaluates the usage of scientific outputs by the mentions cooletcted from researchers and ordinary people. The purpose of this study is to investigate the status of mention of Iranian biomedical journals in social networks and news media in terms of geographical and demographic distribution. Materials and Methods: The present study is a descriptive cross-sectional study using altmetrics data. The statistical population of the study included 422 Iran’s biomedical journals. The list of journal articles was extracted from altmetrics.com and the geographical distribution of the mentions and the demographic distribution of the mentioners were checked. Among the altmetrics metrics, only Twitter data was used for demographic and geographic analysis. To categorize the countries of the world, the "world ranking of countries in terms of human development" was used. Descriptive and analytical statistics were used to analyze the data in SPSS v.26. Results: In general, 170 journals out of 422 medical journals had at least one mention in one of Altmetrics sources. There was a total of 5772 mentions with an overall coverage of 3.81 to 23672 articles published in these journals in Altmetrics sources. The coverage of the total articles published in Iranian journals in Altmetrics was very low 3.6% and in medical journals it was 6.37%. 53 journals had demographic and geographic profiles. The most mentions were on Twitter and were made by 84 countries. The average and standard deviation of the total number of mentions were 79.71 and 47.51 mentions, respectively. The total number of mentions on Twitter was 4522, which was done through 1532 profiles (ordinary people (972), writers (275), scientists (253) and publishers (32) profiles). There was a statistically significant relationship between the mean number of tweets by the group of people. There was a statistically significant difference between indexing of journals in Scopus or Web-of Science and their mentions on Facebook. Most (4522) tweets were made by people from countries with high human development index. Conclusion: The indexing of journals in international databases increases the chance of visibility and being mentioned in social networks. It is necessary to make a suitable policy for the country's journals to be indexed in international indexing databases. Keywords: Altmetric, social networks, medical science, Scholaly publications