Altmetric analysis of Iranian medical journals

Introduction: Altmetrics is a newly emerging scholarly tool measuring the online attention surrounding scientific research outputs. Considering the increasing demand among scientists to disseminate research findings on the World Wide Web, we aimed to analyze the altmetric status of Iranian medical journals. Methods: On September 7, 2018, a list of Iranian medical journals was extracted from http://journals.research.ac.ir/, and consequently altmetric data were taken from Altmetric database (Altmetric LLP, London, UK). To identify the most imperative and dominant Altmetric factors among Iranian medical journals, the multi-layered perceptron artificial neural network was used. Results: A total of 100 journals were found with Altmetric mentions, 7,024 articles were mentioned among Altmetric data resources (Mean: 70.22, Confidence Level (95.0%): 15.4) and total mentions were 25107 (Mean: 250.95, Confidence Level (95.0%): 74.1). Further, 90% of journals had lower than 60 mentioned articles and 281 total mentions. Twitter (70.7%), Facebook (14.3%) Google+ (5%) and News Outlets (4.7%) were the most popular Altmetric data resources. Tweets and Facebook posts were mostly from the U.S. and U.K. The news were mostly from the U.K. and Australia. With respect to the sum of mentions of articles, International Journal of Preventive Medicine achieved the first rank, followed by Journal of Research in Medical Sciences and Iranian Journal of Nursing and Midwifery Research. Discussion: Iranian biomedical journal editors and research scientists must be more active in the realm of World Wide Web using social media, post-publication peer review tools, Stack Exchange (Q A) sites, research highlight tools, Wikipedia, etc. The Iranian government and health policymakers must pay more attention to the concept of evidence-based policymaking.