Division of Plastic Surgery, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN.
McGovern Medical School, Houston, TX.
Aesthet Surg J. 2020 Oct 24;40(11):NP628-NP635. doi: 10.1093/asj/sjaa158.
Altmetrics (alternative metrics) have become one of the most commonly utilized metrics to track the impact of research articles across electronic and social media platforms.
The goal of this study was to identify whether the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) is a good proxy for citation counts and whether it can be employed as an accurate measure to complement the current gold standard.
The authors conducted a citation analysis of all articles published in 6 plastic surgery journals during the 2016 calendar year. Citation counts and AAS were abstracted and analyzed.
A total of 1420 articles were identified. The mean AAS was 11 and the median AAS was 1. The journal with the highest mean AAS was Aesthetic Surgery Journal (31), followed by Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (19). A weak positive correlation was identified (r = 0.33, P < .0001) between AAS and citations. Articles in the top 1% in terms of citation counts showed strong positive correlation between AAS and citation counts (r = 0.64, P = .01). On the contrary, articles in the top 1% of AAS had no significant correlation with citation counts (r = -0.31, P = .29).
Overall correlation between citations and AAS was weak, and therefor AAS may not be an accurate early predictor of future citations. The 2 metrics seem to measure different aspects of the impact of scholarly work and should be utilized in tandem for determining the reach of a scientific article.
替代计量指标（Altmetrics）已经成为在电子和社交媒体平台上跟踪研究文章影响力最常用的指标之一。
本研究旨在确定 Altmetric 关注分数（AAS）是否可以作为替代引文计数的良好指标，以及它是否可以作为一种准确的衡量标准来补充当前的黄金标准。
作者对 2016 年发表在 6 种整形外科学期刊上的所有文章进行了引文分析。提取并分析了引文计数和 AAS。
共确定了 1420 篇文章。平均 AAS 为 11，中位数 AAS 为 1。AAS 平均值最高的期刊是《美容外科杂志》（31），其次是《整形与重建外科杂志》（19）。AAS 与引文之间存在弱正相关（r=0.33，P<.0001）。在引文计数方面排名前 1%的文章中，AAS 与引文计数之间存在很强的正相关（r=0.64，P=.01）。相反，AAS 排名前 1%的文章与引文计数之间没有显著相关性（r=-0.31，P=.29）。
引文与 AAS 之间的总体相关性较弱，因此 AAS 可能不是未来引文的准确早期预测指标。这两个指标似乎衡量了学术工作影响力的不同方面，应同时用于确定科学文章的影响力。
