Academic reception and public dissemination of neurological research between 2012 and 2021

Fundamental changes in the way scientific research is disseminated have inspired the concept of altmetrics, most prominently the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS). The exact relation between the latter and traditional measures of science reception (e.g. citation count) is unknown. In this study, we determined citation counts and AAS as well as the ratio between the two (AAS-to-citation ratio) in 138,339 original research and review articles from 86 neurological journals between 2012 and 2021. The journal impact factor was closely correlated with both citation count (rs = 0.73) and AAS (rs = 0.64), whereas it showed a negative association with the AAS-to-citation ratio (rs = −0.26). Reviews accumulated more citations and a higher AAS than original research, while their AAS-to-citation ratio was significantly lower. Citation count was the only metric significantly associated with the number of publications by country (rs = 0.65). There were notable differences between major neurological subspecialties, with Alzheimer’s disease the article topic having the highest average citation count, AAS, and AAS-to-citation ratio. Our findings suggest that the career of a neurological paper in the academic and public sphere is determined by various and sometimes specific factors.