Altmetrics in Plastic Surgery Journals: Does it Correlate With Citation Count?

BACKGROUND Altmetrics (alternative metrics) has become one of the most commonly used metrics to track the impact of research articles across electronic and social media platforms. OBJECTIVE The goal of this study is to identify whether the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) is a good proxy for citation counts and whether it can be used as an accurate measure to complement the current gold standard. METHODS We conducted a citation analysis of all articles published in six plastic surgery journals during the 2016 calendar year. Citation counts and AAS were abstracted and analyzed. RESULTS We identified a total of 1,420 articles. The mean AAS was 11 while the median AAS was 1. The journal with the highest mean AAS was Aesthetic Surgery Journal (31), followed by Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (19). A weak positive correlation was identified (r=0.33, p<0.0001) between AAS and citations. Articles in the top 1% in terms of citation counts showed strong positive correlation between AAS and citation counts (r=0.64, p=0.01). On the contrary, articles in the top 1% of AAS had no significant correlation with citation counts (r=-0.31, p=0.29). CONCLUSION Overall correlation between citations and AAS was weak, and therefor AAS may not be an accurate early predictor of future citations. The two metrics seem to measure different aspects of the impact of scholarly work and should be used in tandem for determining the reach of a scientific article.