Evaluating the Policy Impact of COVID-19 Health Researches Using the Altmetrics Approach: Countries Policymaking Experiences

The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the policy impact of health researches in the field of COVID-19 with an Altmetrics approach, and other objectives of the study include the study of the popularity of this subject in social media, governance systems and policy documents that have benefited from these studies, their thematic dimensions, and the policy impact of COVID-19 clinical trial researches. This was applied research conducted using altmetric, and content analysis indicators. Based on the above, all the researches of COVID-19 in Pubmed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Cochrane was extracted and observed in the Altmetrics database which returned 4308 researches in COVID-19. 95% of COVID-19 research was mentioned on Twitter. Among them, %0.01 referred to policy documents, of which %45 were related to Switzerland and %36.6 to the United States. Seven of these were conducted as a clinical trial. Topics covered in policy documents of COVID-19 included public health services, clinical sciences, and medical microbiology. Using altmetric and web metrics are useful in tracking the cultural, social, and policy dimensions of researches and monitoring user interactions on social media, especially Twitter, which is an attractive media for academic and non-academic users in a wide range of medical sciences. Moreover, the mentions of these researches in policy documents, in such a short time, express the importance of them at the high policymaking levels of countries, specifically those in clinical trials.