Altmetrics and Citation-Based Indicators in Dentistry Articles of Tehran and Shahid Beheshti Universities of Medical Sciences during 2014-2019

By attention to the problems related to metrics such as H-index, impact factor, citations, and so on, a new concept called altmetrics was introduced. This index assesses the impact of an article in almost real-time using multiple markups and conversations and enables researchers to identify the impact of their work more quickly than traditional metrics. The purpose of this study was to determine and compare altmetrics indicators and citations of dental research articles of Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS) and Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences (SBMU) available at altmetrics.com and Scopus between 2014 and 2019. This is a practical comparative study that has been performed with the scientometrics method. The study population included 810 dentistry articles of TUMS and SBMU during 2014-2019 in the Scopus database. The altmetrics data of articles were collected using altmetrics.com bookmarklet. Data were analyzed using descriptive and analytical statistics in SPSS 21. 73.1% of articles in TUMS and 71.3% in SBMU were cited, which indicates TUMS had a slightly greater share. The articles of TUMS with 17.6% had higher altmetrics coverage than SBMU (14.8%). There was a significant positive correlation between Scopus citations and Dimensions citations (p<0.001, r=0.945) and Mendeley readers (p=0.000, r=0.660) and weak positive correlation between Scopus citations and altmetrics attention score (r=0.115, p= 0.000). There was a positive and moderate correlation between Mendeley readers with CiteScore (p=0.000, r=0.523), SJR (p=0.000, r=0.557) and SNIP (r=0.508, p= 0.000). Also, there was a positive and weak correlation between CiteScore with altmetrics attention score (r=0.135, p=0.000) and Twitter mentions (p=0.049, r=0.133), between SJR and altmetrics attention score (p=0.000, r=0.098) and mentions in Twitter (p=0.010, r=0.174) as well as SNIP with Twitter (p=0.043, r=0.136). The altmetrics indicators of dentistry articles in the selected medical universities were not favorable. It is necessary to provide the background to introduce these indicators to researchers and publishers.