Correlation between Altmetric Attention Score and Citation in the Urological Cancers Literature

Introduction The association between the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS), a surrogate of public attention, and citation in urology cancer field articles was evaluated. Methods We searched in Scopus based on the existence of the following terms in the title, abstract, and keywords: prostate or bladder or kidney or renal or testis, AND tumor or cancer or malignancy, and the top 50 articles of 2015 with the highest citation counts were enrolled in our study. AAS was calculated using Altmetric explorer, and the citation number was extracted from Scopus. Results At last, 23 irrelevant articles were excluded, and 27 remained. The article with the highest citation was placed 11th in the AAS ranking, and the article with the highest AAS was the 12th highly cited article. AAS had a significant association with citation count; however, it did not associate with journals impact factor, study type, study topic, articles access, type of tumor, and geographic distribution (P-value 0.05). Most articles were original, mainly with molecular mechanism and genetics topics, and originated from USA institutions. Moreover, many were published in open-access journals and dedicated to prostate cancer. Conclusions Articles with fabulous citation counts do not necessarily have a higher Altmetric score, which indicates that subjects with high popularity among people may not interest the scientific community.