The Online Attention to Research in Legal Medicine: An Altmetric Study on the Most Discussed Articles on the Web

Abstract

Background: Online attention is a relevant research feature that can be related to its societal impact. Online attention in the field of legal medicine was explored as well as the relation between citation count and the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS). Methods: A search was performed, through the free Dimensions app, during September 2020, on the journals related to legal medicine listed in the 2019 edition of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The 200 published items with the highest AAS were retrieved and screened for bibliometric data. Articles with related citations were gathered from Web of Science (WOS), Scopus, and Dimensions. Results: Seventy-five percent of the articles were published by five of the selected journals. Twitter and news outlets were the most prevalent Altmetric resources. Additionally, 73.5% of the articles were published between 2013 and 2020. The most frequent topics were the ones related to toxicology and pharmacology, followed by criminalistics and law and bioethics. A poor correlation was found between the citations in WOS, Dimensions, and Scopus and the AAS. Conclusions: The online attention on legal medicine-related topics can be considered high on social media. The high number of news outlets is a distinctive feature of the most discussed articles in legal medicine. In this field of medicine, citation-based metrics combined with Altmetric can allow a broader evaluation of research findings but it should be underlined that, when measuring very different aspects of a published item, the scores in classic citation databases and Altmetric do not have a direct relation.