Academic reception and public dissemination of neurological research between 2012 and 2021
Data files
Sep 22, 2023 version files 20.32 MB
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data.set.neurology.xlsx
20.32 MB
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README.md
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Abstract
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.
README: Academic reception and public dissemination of neurological research between 2012 and 2021
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.brv15dvg0
The xlsx.-spreadsheet data.set.neurology.xlsx contains all the raw data used for the present study after removal of any duplicates (identified by the contained DOI) or document with a citation count or Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) of 0.
The columns "citation.count" and "altmetric.score" give the individual score for both these parameters for every document. They were correlated across the whole dataset and were used to calculate the "AAS-to-citation-ratio" defined in our paper. Also included is the year for each document to track the development of these parameters over time.
The 2021 journal impact factor (JIF), gathered from The Web of Science Journals Citation Reports is also included as a seperate column and was used for the association analysis between citation counts, AAS, the ratio of the two and the JIF.
The column "country" gives the country of origin of each individual document's first author's institution, used in the association analyses between dissemination metrics and country of origin.
Finally, the last five columns detail, whether the individual document deals with one of the five major neurological subspecialties in a TRUE or FALSE manner. These data were used in the last paragraph of our results section, which looks at potential associations between dissemination metrics and neurologial subspecialties.
Description of the data and file structure
The "data.set.neurology.xlsx" file contains all the raw data used in our analyses and is structured as follows (column-by-column):
- journal: This column gives the publication the individual document appears in in all caps.
- doi: The unqiue digital object identifier for each document.
- year: The year the document was published in. In the case of "online first"-documents, the year of the eventual journal publication was chosen.
- citation count: The number of citations a document accumulated until the time of data collection.
- author.keywords: The keywords chosen for the respective document by its authors (info on this metric can be found here: https://images.webofknowledge.com/images/help/WOS/hp_full_record.html).
- keywords.plus: Index terms automatically generated from the titles of cited articles. KeyWords Plus terms must appear more than once in the bibliography and are ordered from multi-word phrases to single terms (definition taken from: https://images.webofknowledge.com/images/help/WOS/hp_full_record.html).
- country: The country of origin of the document's first author's institution.
- type: The type of document, either original research (designated as "ARTICLE") or review ("REVIEW").
- altmetric.score: The Altmetric Attention Score for each document by the time of data collection.
- impact.score: The 2021 journal impact factor according to WoS Journal Citation Records.
- -15.: The five chosen major neurological subspecialties (Stroke, Alzheimer's, Multiple Sclerosis (MS in the file), Parkinson's, Epilepsy) and whether a given document pertains to one them (TRUE/FALSE)
Sharing/Access information
Data was derived from the following sources:
- https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/basic-search
- https://jcr.clarivate.com/
- https://www.altmetric.com/
Code/Software
All statistical and graphical analyses were done using the software R (4.1.2) and its packages bibliometrix, patchwork, and tidyverse. P-values < 0.05 were considered statistically significant.
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.