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.