Top COVID-19 100 vaccine papers: An Altmetric study

The high number of COVID-19 studies has attracted scholars to produce many studies on the topic. However, while we know the impact of these studies on academia by analyzing their citation score in different indexing outlets, little is known about their impact on social networks. The current study aims to measure the impact of the top 100 vaccination papers on social networks. An Altmetrics analysis is conducted to measure the Altmetrics attention scores of the paper. We retrieved the data through the Web of Science and Scopus. The researchers selected Altmetric.com as a tool to obtain social media and mainstream internet outlet counts. The findings of the study revealed that there is a significant correlation between the citations and Altmetric indicators. Our findings indicate that Twitter and Mendeley represent the most contributes social networks in the final AAS in almost all journals included in the study. The study’s findings have confirmed that COVID-19 vaccination papers have gained many citations and attention on social networks. The study’s main limitation is that it only measured the Altmetrics score for the top 100 papers. Hence, while the current paper gave us insight into the performance of vaccination papers on the social web, there is a need to conduct further studies covering a larger sample.