Investigating the Presence of Highly Cited Articles on Chronic Diseases in Scientific Social Network: Altmetrics Study

Background: The Clarivate Analytics Company defined the highly cited papers used to measure scientific performance. Altmetrics is a new indicator for evaluation of academic research, which evaluates the findings of research published on social networks. Objectives: This study aimed at evaluating the Altmetrics indicators of highly cited articles on chronic diseases in the two social networks of ResearchGate and Mendeley. Methods: This descriptive-cross sectional study was carried out using the scientometric method. The research data were collected during October 2018 by using Excel 2013 software. HistCiteTM and VOSviewer were used as scientometric software. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 19 through non-parametric statistical tests, such as Spearman and chi-square tests. The significance level was P < 0.05. Results: According to the findings, the coverage rate of highly cited articles on chronic diseases on ResearchGate is about 96.5%, which is better than Mendeley with 92.4%. There was a significant relationship between citation with presence in social networks of research gate and Mendeley (P < 0.05). Each paper indexed in ResearchGate has been read on average by 318.73 individuals. In comparison with that, every paper in Mendeley has been read by 185.76 people, respectively. There was a positive correlation between the number of citations in the Web of Science and “Read” rate of the papers in ResearchGate (0.207) and Mendeley (0.343) (P < 0.05). Conclusions: Altmetric indicators evaluated activities in social media space. Increasing the presence of chronic diseases papers in social networks can actively influence dissemination of knowledge.