Factors associated with high Altmetric Attention Score in dermatology research.

Background: Alternative metrics are emerging scores to assess the impact of research beyond the academic environment.

Objective: To analyse whether a correlation exists between manuscript characteristics and alternative citation metrics.

Materials And Methods: This bibliometric analysis included original articles published in the five journals with the highest impact factors during 2019. We extracted the following characteristics from each record: journal, publication month, title, number of authors, type of institution, type of publication, research topic, number of references, financial support, free/open access status and literature citations. The main measure was the identification of variables of higher social attention (measured by the Altmetric Attention Score ≥25) using binary logistic regression. Model performance was assessed by the change in the area under the curve (AUC).

Results: A total of 840 manuscripts were included. The Altmetric scores across all five journals ranged from 0 to 465 (mean 12.51 ± 33.7; median 3). The most prevalent topic was skin cancer, and the study design was clinical science. The scientific journal (P < 0.001), the presence of conflicts of interest (OR 2.2 [95%CI 1.3-3.7]; P = 0.002) and open access status OR 3.2 [95%CI 1.6-6.7]; P = 0.002) were found as independent predictors of high Altmetric scores.

Conclusions: Our study suggests an article´s social recognition may be dependent on some manuscript characteristics, thus providing useful information on the dissemination of dermatology research to the general public.