An Altmetric Study of Medical Informatics and Health Information ‎Management Articles in Social Media

Altmetrics (Alternative Indicators) are indicators which can be exploited alongside traditional scientometrics concepts based on citation analysis to examine the impact of scientific products on the Web 2 environment. The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence of international articles in the field of medical informatics and health information management in social media and to determine the researchers' use of these media and identify top articles based on Altmetrics scores.

The present study was conducted with a scientometrics approach, using Altmetric indicators. The research population is 64 journals in the field of health information management, medical informatics indexed at the SJR (Sciemgo) and Scopus databases. All the necessary information about the journals and articles, such as the name of the journal, the name of the article, the altimetric score, etc. was obtained by referring to Altmetric.com. Spearman correlation test was used to analyze the data.

Mendeley, Twitter, and Facebook, were among the social media that received the most mentions. The findings indicated that there was a significant relationship between altmetrics coverage (presence in social web environment) and three quality performances Indices (SJR, Snipe and the Site Score). The correlation coefficients obtained for these three indices were, 0.401, 0.248 and 0.285, respectively.

Social media can have a positive effect on the citation rate of scientific articles. Therefore, researchers in the field of medical informatics and health information management can increase the number of citations by sharing their works on social media. Due to the lack of strong correlation in this study, altmetrics can be used to complement scientometrics indices, but not as a alternative to evaluating scientific research.