Estimating the Online Presence of COVID-19 Papers in Social Media: An Altmetric Study

As the significant pandemic of the millennium, COVID-19 attracted research interest worldwide, and many papers have been published on the topic and increasingly shared in different social media. This study aimed to estimate the presence of COVID-19 papers in social media.

In this altmetric survey, Altmetric Explorer was used for data extraction. A comprehensive unlimited search was done on 9 July 2022 for COVID-19 papers mentioned at least once on social media. All 162,068 related papers as the study population was analyzed in Excel 2016 and SPSS v22.

151,956 COVID-19 papers (93.76%) were mentioned at least once on social media. Most papers (100,295) were within the altmetric attention score ranging from 1-10. As the top-ranked source, Twitter mentioned 144,073 papers (88.90%), followed by Mendeley, covering 129,328 (79.79%), papers and News Outlet covering 39,445 papers (24.33%). Most Twitter, Facebook, and News users were from the USA and the UK. "MedRexiv" ranked first with mentioning 10,971 papers, followed by the British Medical Journal with 2,122 mentioned papers and the Lancet with 692 mentioned papers. In the top highly-mentioned papers, some central aspects of the disease, such as its prevention, treatment, and vaccination, were considered as main public concerns.

COVID-19 research has been increasingly presented in social media, which is a sign of considering COVID-19 as a primary human concern. Thus, social media platforms have a prominent role in the reach and visibility of research output in COVID-19.