Journal of Modern Medical

Introduction
With the increase in scientific production, scientometrics has become one of the most common methods for evaluating the scientific performance of scholars. From the 1960s onwards, the use of quantitative scientometric indices such as science citation index and citation databases such as Scopus facilitated the possibility of quantitative study of scientific productions in a time period. With more acceptance of Web 2 tools such as social media sites, the idea of alternative metrics (altmetrics) was proposed as a new method for evaluating the effectiveness of scientific productions in social media sites and also as a complement to traditional scientometric indicators. Altmetrics was originally derived from the term “article-level metrics” and monitors the performance of the article in social networks, regardless of the publishing journal and other articles published in a journal.
With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the amount of scientific production in this field increased, and due to restrictions such as home quarantine, people’s interactions in online social networks increased. However, few studies conducted an altmetric study in the field of COVID-19. Due to the unavailability of an altmetric study on the scientific productions of scholars in the field of COVID-19 in Iran, this study aims to determine the status of citations, altmetrics index, and visibility in scientific social networks for scientific productions of the faculty members of Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences (HUMS).

Methods
This is a descriptive-analytical study with a cross-sectional design using scientometric approach. The study population consists of the articles of the HUMS faculty members during the pandemic (2020-2022) indexed in the Scopus database. Research data was collected using PlumX, which is a web-based tool in the Scopus database that evaluates the citation impact and the levels of interactions and social discussions around an article and categorizes metrics into five separate categories: Citations, usage, captures, mentions, and social media.
The keyword “Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences” was first searched in the Scopus using the advanced search section by limiting the search to the Affiliation option. Then, using a time filter, articles that published from 2020 to 2022 were extracted. The search yielded 956 records. Then, bibliographic information of all works, their citations and data related to the metrics were extracted and entered into an Excel file. Also, the social networks paying attention to the articles were extracted using the Altmetrics plugin in the Google Scholar search engine and added to the Excel file. Finally, in the Excel file, the keywords COVID, SARS‑CoV‑2 and Corona were used to search the related articles, which led to finding 152 articles. The data were analyzed using descriptive and analytical methods (Spearman correlation test) in SPSS software, version 26.

Results
The review of the works retrieved from the Scopus database showed that, out of 956 articles published by HUMS faculty members during the pandemic, 152 (15.8%) articles were in the field of COVID-19. Also, the results of the search strategy showed that 863 articles (90.2% of all articles and 46% of COVID-19-related articles), were mentioned in social networks. There was an increase in the number of citations and attention to articles in social networks in some years of the study period. The rate of attention paid to the articles during the study period was 90.27% and was mainly done by capture (68.89%), social media (8.8%), view (8.4%), tweet (8.3%), and citation (2.56%) according to altmetric indicators.
Among the altmetric indicators for all the articles, the most frequent indicator was “readers”, which is a subset of the “capture” metric. The least frequent indicator was “citation indexes”, which is a subset of the “citation” metric. Among the monitored social networks, HUMS’s COVID-19-related articles received the most attention in Mendeley, followed by Twitter (X). The results of Pearson’s correlation test showed a positive and strong correlation between citations to all articles and their altmetrics index and between citations to COVID-19-related articles and their altmetrics index.

Conclusion
This study suggests the use of the altmetrics index along with the citation index to evaluate the social impact of research. Using the potential of social networks as an effective support and complementary tool to increase the visibility of articles in different social networks, encouraging scholars to use social networks such as ResearchGate, and holding educational workshops in universities on how to create a profile in social networks and share scientific outputs in these networks can help to institutionalize the concept of altmetrics index in the academic community, help with more effective and targeted use of social networks and facilitate scientific communication between scholars in Iran. Monitoring and comparing the scientific productions of faculty members from different departments can provide useful and effective competition for faculty members.

Ethical Considerations

Compliance with ethical guidelines
This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences (Code: IR.HUMS.REC.1401.283).

Funding
This article is financially supported by the Research and Technology Vice-Chancellor of Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences.

Authors' contributions
Conceptualization: Kimia Zeraatkar, Nader Alishan Karami, Farid Khorrami; Investigation: Kimia Zeraatkar; Writing the original draft: Kimia Zeraatkar; Review and editing: Kimia Zeraatkar, and Nader Alishan Karami; Supervision: Kimia Zeraatkar.

Conflicts of interest
The authors declared no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Research and Technology Vice-Chancellor of Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences.




References