Measuring the online attention of the Rehabilitation Web of Science category: an Altmetrics-based analysis

Abstract

Social media has changed the way of the scientific output dissemination. Although currently the impact on social media is not considered as a substitute of the traditional metrics, they start to be considered as complementary. These new measures, that quantify the social impact, are known as Altmetrics. In that way, the Rehabilitation research field is composed of different professional areas that have a high impact on the general population well-being. For this reason, it could be interesting to measure the impact on social media and relate it to the scientific impact. Therefore, in the present work, two different analyses were performed based on the papers published in the Rehabilitation Web of Science category in the period 2013-2017: i) a descriptive analysis of the documents, in order to discover the overall impact, the Top 20 journals, and Top 10 papers by mentions and citations; and ii) a statistical analysis based on correlation, to discover the relationships between the different variables. Among our findings, Twitter is the social media in which the production attracts higher social attention. Nevertheless, not all types of documents and journals obtain the same social and scientific recognition.