Analysis of highly tweeted dental journals and articles: a science mapping approach

Abstract

Aim We aimed to rank dental journals according to the number of Twitter mentions related to their articles. We set out to analyse and visualise the bibliometric characteristics of highly tweeted articles. Methods Twitter mentions were extracted from the Altmetric database. Bibliometric data were obtained from the Web of Science and analysed by VOSviewer software. Hotspots among highly tweeted articles visualised by keyword co-occurrence network analysis. Bibliographic coupling network analysis was used to find the most influential journals, institutions and countries. Results A total of 20,520 Twitter accounts which shared 93,776 tweets related to 23,686 articles from 91 journals were analysed. The British Dental Journal had the highest number of Twitter mentions related to dental articles. Children, dental caries, and periodontal disease were the hottest topics among the 134 highly tweeted dental articles. @TheBDJ had the highest number of tweets related to dental articles, followed by @Dddent2 and @garytakacs. @The BDA had the highest number of followers, followed by @Dddent2 and @TheBDJ. Discussion Ground breaking issues such as genomic medicine, stem cells, tissue engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence were not seen among the highly tweeted dental articles. In the 'Twittersphere', some independent scientists are more active than well-known dental organisations and journals. The journals are strongly recommended to be proactive in Twittersphere, to set up their own Twitter profile, and to promote their visibility and social impact by immediately tweeting the articles. Researchers should be alert to the overuse of Twitter in scholarly communications. The Kardashian index will be a useful tool to measure the over/under activity of a researcher on Twitter.