Analyzing the social impact of orthodontic articles published by Chinese authors in international journals during the past five years

Objective To evaluate and analyze the social impact of orthodontic articles published by Chinese authors in international journals during the past five years, using an altmetric tool; and to explore the practical value of altmetrics measures in the evaluation of dental research. Methods PubMed was searched via the Altmetric Explorer platform to identify orthodontic research articles that were published during 2012-2016, with at least one affiliation from China. Commentaries, news reports and editorials were excluded. By reading titles and abstracts, two authors carried out inclusion and exclusion of literature independently to exclude articles that are not related to orthodontics and retracted articles. Data extraction was performed simultaneously. Any disagreement was resolved by discussion. Linear regressions were used to analyze the association between Altmetric attention score (AAS) and potentially related factors. Results Among 864 articles identified from PubMed, a total of 206 received an AAS, and 160 articles were included for analyzing. The mean AAS of orthodontic research articles from China was 2.7 (95% confidence interval: 2.0 to 3.4). American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics had the most scored articles (n=24) and the highest total AAS (67.0), while European Journal of Orthodontics had the highest mean AAS (3.8). All the top-3 articles were published in Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Significant positive associations were found among high impact factors (P<0.05), high level of evidence (P<0.001) and the AAS. Conclusions Publishing more high-impact articles and high level of evidence articles improved the international social impact of orthodontic research from China. As a valuable supplement to citation counts, Altmetric measures had practical values in dental research area. Key words: Bibliometrics; Orthodontics; Journal article; Journal impact factor; Altmetrics