Dedicated COVID-19 Resource Center in Radiology Journals: Its Citation Metrics and Altmetrics Impact

Abstract

Background: Since the emergence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), several journals established dedicated resource center for all articles published on COVID-19. Our study compared the altmetric impact captured by articles published in journals having such COVID-19 resource center. Methods: We used Web of Science database to assess radiology journals publishing most common articles on COVID-19. We used Dimensions database to assess citations received and altmetric attention score for each article. For each article, we extracted number of citation received and altmetric attention score. To account for the the variation in strength and exposure between included journals, we adopted a normalization strategy and we used regression analysis in our statistical analysis. Results: A total of 494 articles included in the current assessment, including 334 (67.6%) articles published in journals with dedicated COVID-19 resource center including European radiology, American Journal of Roentgenology, Radiology, and Journal of the American college of radiology, while European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Academic Radiology did not have COVID-19 resource center. Journals with COVID-19 resource center had a mean normalized altmetric attention score of 0.38 higher (95% CI 0.25 to 0.50; p< 0.001) and a mean normalized citation count of 6.73 higher (95% CI 3.99 to 9.48; p< 0.001) than those without COVID-19 resource center. Conclusion: Radiology journals that provided COVID-19 articles in a dedicated resource center within its homepage had higher attention and citation for their COVID-19 articles compared to journals that did not have such dedicated resource center.