The relationship between altmetric score with received citations in Iranian pediatrics articles [version 1; peer review: 1 not approved]

Background: Today, in addition to citations and with the expansion of social media, the use of altmetrics has gained attention as a tool necessary for evaluating the effects of scientific publications. The present study intended to monitor Iranian pediatrics articles, as one of the leading areas of scientific publications in Iran, between the years 2010-2016 using altmetrics and citation-metrics, and then evaluate the relationship between the altmetric score and number of received citations. Methods: This is a practical study of the analytical descriptive type and the research methodology is scientometrics. This research included 1332 research articles, review articles and conference articles in the field of pediatrics from Iran during 2010-2016, published in the Web of Science. Authors, year, journal and social media was determined in these articles. Data analysis was carried out using SPSS21 software and descriptive and inferential statistics (Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Spearman correlation). Results: A total of 1138 articles have citations and 256 articles had altmetric activity. The results indicate a significant correlation among the articles' altmetric scores and number of received citations. Among the data sources of altmetric score, mentions of articles in Mendeley, Twitter, and Facebook had the highest ranking. The number of times an article was read in Mendeley had a significant correlation with the number of citations. Conclusions: It seems that altmetrics better represent the impact of newer articles, while older articles had received more citations. In addition, a high number of reads in Mendeley correlates with received citations. However, Mendeley reads do not involve altmetric score calculation algorithms, and this should be implemented in the future.