Academic reception and public dissemination of neurological research between 2012 and 2021

Fundamental changes in the way scientific research is disseminated have inspired the concept of altmetrics, most prominently the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS). The exact relation between the latter and traditional measures of science reception (e.g. citation count) is unknown. In this study, we determined citation counts and AAS as well as the ratio between the two (AAS-to-citation ratio) in 138,339 original research and review articles from 86 neurological journals between 2012 and 2021. The journal impact factor was closely correlated with both citation count (rs = 0.73) and AAS (rs = 0.64), whereas it showed a negative association with the AAS-to-citation ratio (rs = −0.26). Reviews accumulated more citations and a higher AAS than original research, while their AAS-to-citation ratio was significantly lower. Citation count was the only metric significantly associated with the number of publications by country (rs = 0.65). There were notable differences between major neurological subspecialties, with Alzheimer’s disease the article topic having the highest average citation count, AAS, and AAS-to-citation ratio. Our findings suggest that the career of a neurological paper in the academic and public sphere is determined by various and sometimes specific factors.

Methods
To gain a representative overview of the research in neurology during the decade of interest, we took the top 20 neurology journals by h5 index11 listed on Google Scholar and combined them with the top 50 neurology and clinical neurology journals according to the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) (https://www.scimagojr.com). Only journals with at least 100 citable documents (i.e. original research or reviews) over the period of interest were considered to avoid potential bias by outliers. Any duplicates were removed. In total, 86 journals were chosen for further analyses.

The Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection was used for the identification of articles to be included. Every document from the 86 journals listed as either ‘Article’ or ‘Review’ with a final publication year between 2012 and 2021 was included in the analysis. This timeframe was selected with two reasons in mind: First, the company Altmetric (and with it the AAS) was founded in 2011, so 2012 constitutes the earliest year with full coverage. Second, since the data collection took place in late 2022, the year 2021 was fully covered in the databases and article citations/online dissemination had already been given some time to accumulate. Citation counts and other metadata for each document were retrieved from the WoS Core Collection database. Impact factors for each journal were retrieved through Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (2021 being the most recent data available).
AAS data were obtained through the Altmetric API using the documents’ unique Digital Object Identifier. All data were collected between the 13th and 15th of November, 2022.