Analysis of altmetrics and additional metrics of the 50 most-cited Behçet articles of all time: A Web of Science-based study.

Objective

The number of citations is used for the scholarly impact of a published article, but it does not always correlate with higher-quality research. Behçet's disease (BD) is a debilitating-blinding disorder with a significant volume of published articles in literature. Our aim was to investigate the references of the 50 most-cited Behçet articles and to evaluate the relationship between altmetric attention score (AAS) and additional metrics.

Methods

The Web of Science (WoS) core collection was used to search for the 50 most-cited Behçet articles. Additional metrics and AAS of the reviewed articles and the journals in which the articles were published, were evaluated.

Results

A total of 11.372 published articles on BD, between 1975 and 2022, were found. The citation range of 50 highly-cited articles was between 172 and 1322. The "top 50 list" articles were published between 1988 and 2018, and the average age of the article since publication was 18.86 ± 6.08 years. Rheumatology journals were the most published category with 21 articles. There was a weak-to-moderate correlation between AAS and additional metrics.

Conclusions

This is the first analysis regarding the AAS of the 50 most-cited articles on BD, which provides useful information about the social impact and characteristics in the academic community. AAS correlates weakly with citation-based quality indexes, and moderately with immediacy index, which evaluates speed. The publication year should be considered when comparing or evaluating the AAS of articles. AAS could be evaluated in a secondary plan for scientific impact analysis.