Altmetric analysis of contemporary dental literature

Abstract

Aim To analyse the Altmetric data of all dental literature and to find the most important and effective Altmetric factors. Method PubMed was searched to find all types of dental articles. To discover the most important and effective Altmetric factors in contemporary dental literature, multi-layered perceptron artificial neural network was used. Results A total of 582,227 PubMed records were found. The mean Altmetric scores were 3.7 +/- 18, 4.1 +/- 16 and 3.2 +/- 14 for clinical trials, reviews and free full-text articles, respectively. Sensitivity analysis showed that news outlets, tweeters and scientific bloggers were the most important and influential Altmetric data resources. Among 150 analysed dental journals the British Dental Journal acquired the first rank. Twitter was the most popular Altmetric resource among dental journals. Conclusion Dental researchers, journal editors, publishers and research funders should pay more attention to Altmetrics as a newly-emerging scholarly tool measuring the social impact of research findings.