Assessing the impact of history of medicine research: A scientometric and altmetric analysis

Abstract

AbstractBackground and AimsAfter conducting a comprehensive literature search of two medical electronic databases, PubMed and Embase, as well as two citation databases, Web of Science Core Collections (WoS) and Scopus, we aimed to conduct an Altmetric and Scientometric analysis of the History of Medicine literature in medical research.MethodsThe following software tools were used for analyzing the retrieved records from PubMed and Embase databases and conducting a collaboration analysis to identify the countries involved in scientific medical papers, as well as clustering keywords to reveal the trend of History of Medicine research for the future. These software tools (VOSviewer 1.6.18 and Spss 16) allowed the researchers to visualize bibliometric networks, perform statistical analysis, and identify patterns and trends in the data.ResultsOur analysis revealed 53,771 records from PubMed and 54,405 records from EMBASE databases retrieved in the field of History of Medicine by 105,286 contributed authors in WoS. We identified 157 countries that collaborated on scientific medical papers. By clustering 59,995 keywords, we were able to reveal the trend of History of Medicine research for the future. Our findings showed a positive association between traditional bibliometrics and social media metrics such as the Altmetric Attention Score in the History of Medicine literature (p < 0.05).ConclusionSharing research findings of articles in social scientific networks will increase the visibility of scientific works in History of Medicine research, which is one of the most important factors influencing the citation of articles. Additionally, our overview of the literature in the medical field allowed us to identify and examine gaps in the History of Medicine research.