Altmetric Behaviour over a Two-Year Observation Period: A Longitudinal Cohort Study in Orthodontic Research

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an excellent paper that supports an anecdotal phenomenon that librarians and information scientists have observed for some time--it takes a large amount of time for additions to bodies of literature (in this case orthodontics focused literature) to achieve a level of scholarly awareness such that their impact is notable through citations.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1 

Thanks for the time and effort spent in reviewing our paper 

kind regards

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

interesting study but you can improve it by adding:

1. Who was responsible for every step in searching and analizing article fitting to the aim?

2. Please add IF of the magazines you have analyzed.

3. What is the number one from this magazines in your country?

4. Does the country of publishing the and langaue of the magazine can have an impact of the results?

Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 4

Thanks for the time and effort spent in reviewing our manuscript. We enclose the comments to yours valuable comments:

Who was responsible for every step in searching and analizing article fitting to the aim?

Dear reviewer 2 the following have been added according to your valuable suggestion:

Three members of the study group cross-checked the number of items retrieved with the one reported in PubMed, and items such as adverts, letters, replies, table of contents and obituaries, were excluded from the final sample, that included 3678 published items. The same members of the study group screened items with positive AAS (AAS ≥ 1) and extracted by consensus information

2. Please add IF of the magazines you have analyzed.

The data have been added in table 1 according to your valuable suggestion

3. What is the number one from this magazines in your country?

We lack of country data but Progress in orthodontics was the journal with the highest impact factor in the 2022 JCR

4. Does the country of publishing the and langaue of the magazine can have an impact of the results?

Most of the authors reported that from a bibliometric point of view there is an over-representation of English-language journals and English-speaking countries as; somewhat an expected finding taking into account that English is the preferred language in biomedical research. United States and United Kingdom are the countries of origin of the greatest number of journals. Other authors highlighted that while the language has a positive impact on citations the country of origin could have a weaker one, since the editorial board composition country-wise could also have a role. Unfortunately the impact of these factors on online attention have never been addressed in literature.

 

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper analyzes Altmetric resources as an indicator for future citations. The methods are sound, and the analysis and the conclusions drawn from the results are exciting and worth sharing with the journal's readers; therefore, I suggest accepting it in its present form.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 3 

Thanks for the time and effort spent in reviewing our article

kind regards

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear Authors,

I want to congratulate you on your interesting work. However, some improvements can be done to improve the quality of the paper. 

1. Introduction

- Briefly explain the JCR term, as done for JIF.

- A study evaluating the relationship between social media and scientific publications in orthodontics was published on PMID: 37208205. I believe that describing and discussing these findings in the introduction and discussion section would be a good improvement for the manuscript

-Please, in the last paragraph of the introduction section, add the objectives of the present work. 

2. Material and methods

-Please, provide a flowchart illustrating the time points of the longitudinal study and the different types of data that were collected. 

 

Discussion

There are other social media specialized in scientific communities, such as research gate and linked in. Do the authors believe that those could also be tools to track? I believe that using these platforms will help to understand the gap between scientific publications/citations to general social media. Please, discuss.

 

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 4

Thanks for the time and effort spent in reviewing our manuscript. We enclose the comments to yours valuable comments:

1. Introduction

Briefly explain the JCR term, as done for JIF.

line: 56-59. The JCR is an annual report on the citation impact of a defined set of journals at a given moment in time, the jounal list updated every year by Clarivariate, a private stakeholder on the basis of 24 criteria of supposed objectivity, selectivity, reliability and transparency.

A study evaluating the relationship between social media and scientific publications in orthodontics was published on PMID: 37208205. I believe that describing and discussing these findings in the introduction and discussion section would be a good improvement for the manuscript

According to your valuable suggestion the following was included in Line 463-470: Our results are consistent with what previously reported by Livas and Delli in 2018 but in disagreement with what reported by Hassan et al in 2023, that observed a positive correlation between citation counts and AAS, Tweets, an Mendeley readers count. When analyzing Hassan data it should be underlined that they included articles published only in 2018 and they included only original article that usually get more citations than other published items that were included by other studies in the orthodontic field.

-Please, in the last paragraph of the introduction section, add the objectives of the present work. 

According to your valuable suggestion the following was included in Line 146-150: The objective of the current study was to evaluate and analyze the longitudinal behavior of Altmetric resources used to track online attention to research in the field of Orthodontics. Furthermore, we wish to longitudinally explore the correlation between WOS citations, Scopus citations, and the different Altmetric resources.

2. Material and methods

-Please, provide a flowchart illustrating the time points of the longitudinal study and the different types of data that were collected.

According to your suggestion the flow-chart was added as additional figure 2, S2

Discussion

There are other social media specialized in scientific communities, such as research gate and linked in. Do the authors believe that those could also be tools to track? I believe that using these platforms will help to understand the gap between scientific publications/citations to general social media. Please, discuss.

According to your valuable suggestion the following was assed to the main text at line 436-451

Lastly, it is interesting to discuss the role of Social research networks as ResearchGate or Academia.edu, both launched in 2008, have been able to attract the interest of an increasing number of users among researchers and academics along the last decade reaching respectively 20 million users and 175 million users. They offer citations count using a similar dynamic to classic citations, and they also provide alternative metrics based on mentions, reads, recommendations, downloads, or acknowledgements. Although these social networks do not track altmetrics, they allow authors to upload preprints enabling them to provide early impact evidence for their new research outputs. Social research networks can help increase the visibility of researchers, helping younger members of research teams and researchers working in countries with limited access to literature database to draw attention to their work. Some authors reported that posting on a social research network site allows to attract more citations than posting on other parts of the public web[38]. Some authors suggested that social research networks are not yet reliable to track for early citation impact indicators. Like many web-gathered indicators, they can potentially be manipulated by uploading non-peer reviewed or fake documents and hence should be carefully interpreted for research evaluation[39][40]