Association Between Citations, Altmetrics, and Article Views in Pediatric Research

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Citations are used to assess the impact of scientific authors, articles, and journals but may not fully reflect how they affect journal readership or the public. Newer metrics include article views and the Altmetric attention score (AAS),1 which uses an algorithm to weight mentions of an article in social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and in the news media. Prior investigations have shown only a modest association between these newer metrics and article citations, but none have assessed the pediatric literature, which may have a different readership.1-4 The primary objective of this study was to examine the association between traditional metrics (citations), the AAS, and views of pediatric articles from 4 high-impact journals. Strong correlation would imply that citations-based metrics indicate popular engagement in scientific articles.