Association Between Immediacy of Citations and Altmetrics in COVID-19 Research by Artificial Neural Networks

Objectives: Both citations and Altmetrics are indexes of influence of a publication, potentially useful, but to what extent that the professional-academic citation and media-dominated Altmetrics are consistent with each other is a topic worthy of being investigated. The objective is to show their correlation. Methods: DOI and citation information of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) researches were obtained from the Web of Science, its Altmetric indicators were collected from the Altmetrics. Correlation between the immediacy of citation and Altmetrics of COVID-19 research was studied by artificial neural networks. Results: Pearson coefficients are 0.962, 0.254, 0.222, 0.239, 0.363, 0.218, 0.136, 0.134, and 0.505 (P < 0.01) for dimensions citation, attention score, journal impact factor, news, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, video, and Mendeley correlated with the SCI citation, respectively. The citations from the Web of Science and that from the Altmetrics have deviance large enough in the current. Altmetric score is not precise to describe the immediacy of citations of academic publication in COVID-19 research. Conclusions: The effects of news, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, video, and Mendeley on SCI citations are similar to that of the journal impact factor. This paper performs a pioneer study for investigating the role of academic topics across Altmetric sources on the dissemination of scholarly publications.

Automated summary

This study investigated the correlation between citations and Altmetrics for COVID-19 research, finding significant deviations between citations from Web of Science and Altmetrics, indicating that Altmetrics may not accurately describe the impact of academic publications. Moreover, the effects of news, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, video, and Mendeley on SCI citations were found to be similar to that of the journal impact factor.