An Altmetric Study on Scientific Articles of " Health Literacy" in Social Media

Due to the capabilities of alternative metrics and their speed in evaluating scientific outputs, and the importance of social media in establishment of scholarly communication and findings’ dissemination, the aim of this study was to investigate the use of social media by health literacy researchers, and to identify top articles based on altmetric score and the association between altmetrics and citation indicators.
The current descriptive research was conducted through scientometrics method and using altmetrics data. The study population consisted of health literacy articles that were published in year 2015, had digital object identifier (DOI), and were indexed in Web of Science. The initial number of retrieved articles was 649 papers. Since the digital object identifiers was required in altometric studies and the use of data from the Altmetric Institute, the documents that did not have the identifier were removed and thus the research population was reduced to 615 record. To collect alternative indicators, each individual article was matched by altmetric.com manually. Spearman correlation was used for analyzing the data.
Mendeley and Twitter were the most used social media by health literacy scholars for sharing scientific outputs, ranked first and second by number of 492 and 487 articles respectively. The results revealed statistically significant relationship between most alternative metrics and the number of citations in Web of Science. From the reviewed articles, Iranian researchers wrote 9 articles on health literacy. Of these, 6 had a digital object identifiers. After searching on the altmetric site, it became clear that these six articles have been used in Mendeley's social media and Twitter compared to more than other social media and had 134 readers in Mendeley and 64 tweets in Twitter respectively.
Social media can have a positive impact on the citation rate of articles. Therefore, health literacy researchers can make use of social media in order to better inform peers on the Internet and increase the citation to their scientific productions. For this purpose, they could share their work in various social media.