Presence of Scientific Outputs of Medical Informatics in Social Media: An Altmetric Study

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 medical informatics researchers, and 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 medical informatics articles which were published in 2014 in four core journals, had digital object identifier (DOI), and were indexed in Web of Science. To collect alternative indicators, each individual article was matched by altmetric.com manually. Spearman correlation was used for analyzing data.
Mendeley, Twitter, Facebook, CiteULike, Blog, News Outlet, and Google Plus were the most used social media by medical informatics scholars for sharing scientific outputs. The results revealed statistically significant relations between most alternative metrics and the number of citations in Web of Science.
Social media can have a positive impact on the citation rate of articles. Therefore, medical informatics researchers can make use of social media in order to better search information on the internet and increase the citation to their scientific productions. For this purpose, they share their work in various social media.