Elsevier

Dental Abstracts

Volume 62, Issue 1, January–February 2017, Pages 46-47
Dental Abstracts

Inquiry
Measuring the impact of scholarly articles

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.denabs.2016.09.037Get rights and content

Section snippets

Background

Bibliometrics refers to the statistical analysis of written publications. A notable aspect is citation analysis, which tracks the number of citations of an article in other works to indicate its impact. Today, the emergence of Internet-based technologies has opened up new perspectives to assess research’s impact. Social media and new scholarly e-tools both facilitate and improve communication, but also create a need for new metrics to measure the impact or use of scholarly publications.

What is Altmetrics?

Altmetrics is an emerging scholarly tool to measure the online attention accorded to journal articles. Resources for the data include policy documents, news outlets, blogs, online reference managers such as Mendeley and CiteULike, post-publication peer-review forums such as PubPeer and Publons, social media, Wikipedia, sites running Stack Exchange, and reviews on F1000 and YouTube. A specific tool has been developed to allow individuals to access data on individual articles using a free

Method

PubMed was searched to identify all of the dental articles in 2014. All of the records were extracted and sent to Altmetric LLP in London as a comma-separated values (CSV) file for examination. Descriptive statistics and charts were prepared through Microsoft Office Excel 2010.

Results

A total of 15,132 dental articles were found through PubMed in 2014. The top 50 dental articles with the highest Altmetric score were identified. Of these, 48% were found in the British Dental Journal and 16% in the Journal of Dental Research (Fig 3). Mean Altmetric score was 69.5. The most popular altmetric data resources were Twitter (67.13%), Mendeley (15.89%), and news outlets (10.92%) (Fig 4).

The highest number of tweets was logged in the United Kingdom (30.54%) and the United States

Discussion

Dentistry is notoriously slow in recognizing and implementing new technologies and methods. Although many articles are available for consumption, many are not accessed.

Clinical Significance

Altmetrics is designed to supplement bibliometrics in measuring the social impact of scholarly articles. Through these articles, dental practitioners learn of new and exciting methods that can improve patient care, improve office management, and improve their abilities as health care providers.

References (0)

Cited by (0)

Kolahi J, Khazaei S: Almetric: Top 50 dental articles in 2014, Br Dent J 220:569-574, 2016

Reprints available from S Khazaei; e-mail: [email protected]

View full text