Session: Poster session C

Online Visibility and Scientific Relevance of Strabismus Research: Bibliometric Analysis

Introduction: Quality and accuracy of online scientific data are crucial given the internet and social media serve as primary sources of medical knowledge nowadays. Our study aims to assess the relationship between online visibility and the scientific relevance of strabismus research.



Methods: The Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) served as a proxy for online visibility, whilst citations and the journal’s impact factor as a metric for scientific robustness. A list of 100 articles with the highest AAS and 100 papers with the highest citations including the keyword "strabismus" was generated. Data for citations, time since publication, and the journal's impact factor were collected. Correlation between all variables was tested with Spearman's rank correlation coefficient.



Results: For the 100 articles with the highest AAS, we demonstrated a significant, but weak correlation between online visibility and citations (p = 0.04, r = 0.22). We found no correlation between Altmetric Attention Score and the journal's impact factor (p = 0.15) or time (p = 0.37). For the 100 articles with the highest number of citations, we found no correlation between the citations and the AAS (p = 0.73) or the journal’s impact factor (p = 0.55).



Conclusions: Although highly publicised papers tend to be cited more frequently, the most highly cited papers are not always the ones being most shared on social media. Therefore, researchers should make a greater effort to share potentially high-impact studies on social media to improve the dissemination of their data, increase citations in related papers and enhance the quality of evidence-based knowledge for patients.