Analysis of trending topics in glaucoma articles from an altmetric perspective.

PURPOSE

Altmetric analyses are a new way of assessing and sharing scientific knowledge. Traditional metrics and altmetric analyses highlight key publications. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the social attention paid to highly cited articles related to glaucoma in the recent English literature and compare with traditional citation metrics.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

"Glaucoma" was entered as a search term into Thomson Reuter's Web of Science database, and all articles related to the topic in the last decade were identified. The 50 highly cited articles (T50 list) were analyzed by topic, journal name, author name, year of the publication and Altmetric Attention Score (AAS). Descriptive statistics and Spearman correlation test were determined with the use of SPSS.

RESULTS

According to bibliometric criteria, there were 31,370 eligible articles and the median (range) citation number was recorded as 181.5 (158.75-250.75). The T50 list was ranked with AASs between 176 and 0. The median AAS was 5 (2.75-10). The main subjects of the top 10 highly cited articles were mostly related to follow-up and prognostics about glaucoma (n = 3), while the main subjects of the top 10 articles with the highest AAS were related to genetics in glaucoma pathogenesis (n = 2), treatment modalities (n = 2) and pathophysiology with therapeutics of glaucoma disease (n = 2). AASs and citation number showed a positive moderate correlation (r = 0.403 p = 0.004), although AASs did not correlate with journal impact factor (r = 0.36 p = 0.01). No statistically significant correlation was found for ASSs and citation numbers with H-index of the journals on the T50 list.

CONCLUSIONS

Bibliometric-based altmetric analyses offer important but different perspectives regarding article impact. This study provides valuable information about trending topics related to glaucoma research and its impact in both the academic literature and social media CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: With regard to the data characteristics of the manuscript, which is mainly retrospective and international, the clinical trial registration process is theoretically not applicable to this study.