Study design: Literature review.
Objective: To discern which social media outlets contribute most to spine surgery literature dissemination and to investigate how popular articles compare to articles with most citations.
Summary of background data: Scientific literature is increasingly disseminated through social media. The Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) is defined as an automated, weighted score calculation from counts of all online attention received by various research outputs. Increasing AAS values indicate more online attention. For example, the overall top 100 Altmetric spine surgery peer-reviewed articles since 2010 had an AAS range from 78 to 1537. Among all spine surgery literature reviewed since 2010, the mean AAS was 5.3 with a median of 1.0.
Methods: We performed an Altmetric database search of nine spine surgery journals from January 2010 to October 2019. Mean AAS was summarized alongside metrics including citation count and impact factor. We assessed correlations between AAS and online sources, readers, and citations. Journals were grouped by impact factor, and analysis-of-variance compared mean AAS. The 100 highest AAS articles were compared to the most cited.
Results: 13,601 articles were included. The mean AAS was 5.3, with Twitter contributing the most. The three highest associations were news (P < 0.001), Twitter (P < 0.001), and Facebook (P < 0.001). There was no significant association between impact factor and AAS. Compared with the most cited articles, the top 100 AAS articles had significantly more article types, more prospective studies, fewer retrospective studies, fewer reviews, and fewer systematic reviews (P < 0.001 for all). Spine contributed the most articles in both top 100 sets.
Conclusion: Our evaluation revealed Twitter, newsfeeds, and Facebook were the most significant social media outlets. Compared to articles with the most citations, the most popular articles are prospective and encompass broader study designs. Social media plays an integral role in dissemination, both within spine literature and the public sphere.
Level of evidence: 3.