The impact of low back pain systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines measured by the Altmetric score: Cross-Sectional study.

Background: Although Altmetric has been widely used by researchers to monitor the audience of their articles, there are no studies that have analysed factors associated with Altmetric score for systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines.

Objectives: 1) To analyse factors that could be associated with Altmetric scores for low back pain systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines. 2) To describe the characteristics of these articles and their Altmetric scores.

Methods: We searched for all low back pain systematic reviews and guidelines indexed on the Physiotherapy Evidence Database published between 2015 and 2017. We extracted data related to the published paper, the publishing journal, and Altmetric scores.

Results: A total of 66 systematic reviews and 5 guidelines were included. The variable impact factor (independent variable) was associated with Altmetric mentioned score (dependent variable) with a β coefficient of 15.4 (95% CI: 0.97, 29.7) ajusted to all remaining variables. The variable number of citations normalized by year of publication (independent variable) was associated with Altmetric reader score (dependent variable) with a β coefficient of 6.4 (95% CI: 4.03, 8.72) ajusted to all remaining variables. We also found that the majority of the systematic reviews and guidelines were published in English, had a descriptive title, were published as open access, included multicenter studies, and had media release generated by the publishing journal.

Conclusion: Metrics related to the number of citations, such as the impact factor are associated with Altmetric scores.