Altmetrics of breast cancer clinical trials’ subgroup analysis: A systematic review.

Abstract

e13640 Background: Sharing findings of clinical trials using the internet and social media is increasing. Altmetric attention scores are instantaneous evaluations of the influence and popularity of science in a variety of media, such as news, blogs, and different social media platforms. Altmetrics’ distributions and trends for subgroup analyses were not previously investigated. Our study aimed to characterize altmetrics of the studies reporting subgroup analyses of breast cancer clinical trials and to assess the association between altmetrics and other characteristics of publications. Methods: We performed a systematic review of all published secondary analyses of breast cancer clinical trials form Jan 2020 until Feb 15, 2022. 1491 secondary analysis of solid malignancies were identified of which 287 were related to breast cancer. The altmetric scores for the included studies were obtained from a website named Bookmarklet for Researchers on the 12th of Feb 2023. Pearson’s correlation, Independent Samples t test, the one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and Chi-Square test were utilized to identify associations between a number of the studies’ characteristics and altmetrics. Statistical analysis was completed using SPSS Statistics. Results: Altmetric scores were captured for 211 (73.5%) of the 287 included publications. The median score was 4 (IQR 2-19). The captured altmetric scores ranged from 1 to 882. Around 45% of the included studies were first-authored by women and pharmaceutical companies funded approximately 35%. Both gender and funding source did not show any effect on the altmetric scores. Higher altmetric scores ( > = 4) were associated with authors who reported conflicts of interest (COI) (P = 0.001), studies published in 2015 or after (P = 0.003), papers published in journals with higher impact factors (P < 0.001), and publications with a higher number of authors (P = 0.019). Conclusions: Higher number of authors, presence of COI, higher impact factor of the publishing journal, and a publication year of 2015 or after are associated with higher altmetric scores in subgroup analyses of breast cancer-based clinical trials. Given the observational nature of secondary analysis and possible inaccurate conclusions, caution must be entertained when interpreting their findings.