Abstract
Researchers are increasingly using on line social networks to promote their work. Some authors have suggested that measuring social media activity can predict the impact of a primary study (i.e., whether or not an article will be highly cited). However, the influence of variables such as scientific quality, research disclosures, and journal characteristics on systematic reviews and meta-analyses has not yet been assessed. The present study aims to describe the effect of complex interactions between bibliometric factors and social media activity on the impact of systematic reviews and meta-analyses about psoriasis (PROSPERO 2016: CRD42016053181). Methodological quality was assessed using the Assessing the Methodological Quality of Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) tool. Altmetrics, which consider Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ mention counts as well as Mendeley and SCOPUS readers, and corresponding article citation counts from Google Scholar were obtained for each article. Metadata and journal-related bibliometric indices were also obtained. One-hundred and sixty-four reviews with available altmetrics information were included in the final multifactorial analysis, which showed that social media and impact factor have less effect than Mendeley and SCOPUS readers on the number of cites that appear in Google Scholar. Although a journal’s impact factor predicted the number of tweets (OR, 1.202; 95% CI, 1.087–1.049), the years of publication and the number of Mendeley readers predicted the number of citations in Google Scholar (OR, 1.033; 95% CI, 1.018–1.329). Finally, methodological quality was related neither with bibliometric influence nor social media activity for systematic reviews. In conclusion, there seems to be a lack of connectivity between scientific quality, social media activity, and article usage, thus predicting scientific success based on these variables may be inappropriate in the particular case of systematic reviews.
Highlights
The dissemination of research results is necessary for scientific progress because critical assessment of published research promotes new hypotheses that lead to future experiments
In cluster #4 we found reviews that showed more social media activity, but did not observe a differentiating pattern related to methodological quality, source of funding, impact factor, number of readers, or number of cites
Methodological quality of reviews has the least influence on the multidimensional architecture of our reviews, while conflict and social factors showed intermediate structural influence. This is the first study to evaluate the influence of scientific quality and research disclosures on the bibliometrics and altmetrics of systematic reviews of psoriasis
Summary
The dissemination of research results is necessary for scientific progress because critical assessment of published research promotes new hypotheses that lead to future experiments. Many studies have been carried out with the aim to analyze whether social media activity generated by the scientific community about a new publication anticipates the number of cites an article will receive in the future, as a surrogate marker of its scientific quality [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Publishers of scientific journals and the pharmaceutical industry are interested in obtaining a large number of readers and cites per article, so that they can increase their product’s impact factor [11] or the visibility of studies carried out with their products, which in many cases present conflicts of interests with theses [12, 13]. There are validated tools to evaluate the methodological quality of research but they are not available for all types of scientific research
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