Social media is increasingly used for the dissemination of scientific publications by most science, technology and management (STM) journals. Bioinformatics is one of the new areas of research emerging in the subject tree. The role of social media in increasing the awareness of published works in bioinformatics has not been previously explored. Here, a qualitative analysis of the highest trending works in bioinformatics along with a correlation analysis with their social media metrics (altmetrics) is made. A comprehensive search has been performed for articles related to the bioinformatics using the SCOPUS Database. Further, a highly-cited article with more than 1000 citations has been filtered out. Another comprehensive search for bioinformatics articles using the Altmetric database was conducted. The Altmetric database provides a total weighted score of all online mentions for an article received on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and mainstream media sources. There is a significant correlation has been found between the patent mention and citations.
TopLiterature Review
With the advancement of internet, the social media platforms have emerged as an important method of sharing scientific knowledge. The most popular platforms where the scientific knowledge is being shared with the peer are Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Wikipedia etc. These social media platforms have become an alternative measuring tool for potential impact of a citation (Dinsmore, Allen, & Dolby, 2014). The alternative channel of measuring impact is known as Altmetrics (Piwowar, 2013). The Altmetrics is becoming a non-traditional method for impact assessment complementing the traditional citation-based assessment method. It provides an overview on how a research is been shared and discussed on social media platform and carries a weighted composite score for each of the social media platforms (Table 1) (Priem, Taraborelli, Groth, & Neylonm, 2010).
There are many studies describing alternative metrices to assess the research impact other than traditional method. These studies highlight the societal impact, correlations between citation and social network activities at social media platforms (Araujo, Nascimento, Gonzalez, Maher, & Costa, 2018; Barakat et al., 2018; Ramnanan & Thangarasa, 2018; Huang, Wang, & Wu, 2018; Rosenkrantz, Ayoola, Singh, & Duszak, 2017). Bioinformatics is application of computational techniques to understand and organize data generated through biological activities. It has emerged as multifaceted subject after the initiation of Human Genome Projects (Luscombe, Greenbaum, & Gerstein, 2001). As far as alternative impact analysis of bioinformatics literature is concern, no literature has been retrieved. However, there has been some bibliometrics analysis was reported related to the bioinformatics subjects (Bansard et al., 2007; Patra & Mishra, 2014; Song, Kim, Zhang, Ding, & Chambers, 2014). There is no direct study on altmetric analysis of bioinformatics literature reported. However, there is one review which presented the Altmetric application in information portal development (Whetzel, Grethe, Banks, & Martone, 2015). The social media impact analysis using alternative metrices have not been reported so far. So, the purpose of this article is to analyses the top cited articles in bioinformatics and assess whether the social media activities have any correlation on citation. Further, it is aimed to assess the Altmetric scores of these articles with data obtained from Altmetric.com database. Altmetric collects the information about the social activity of the published articles from array of social media and other platforms. The Altmetric attention score is an aggregate of all the mentioned activities of an article associated with an article and presented as weighted score assigned to each social media platform and presented as whole number (Altmetric, n.d.).