Kind Attention to the Altitude of Altmetrics

Dear Editor,

I have read the article entitled “A Bibliometric Analysis of Articles Published in Brazilian Dental Journal over 30 years" by Moraes et al in Brazilian Dental Journal (2020) 31(1): 10-18. I heartily congratulate the authors for the commendable effort on analysing the impact of the publications done in the past 30 years in your esteemed journal. I would like to make some contributions to the article.

The article has extensively analysed the predominant subjects of publication, types of articles published, maximum contributions given to the journal by individual authors and affiliated universities. The article also has given data on the other journals that have cited articles from the Brazilian Dental Journal and most often cited articles. In addition to the meticulously projected bibliometric data, the authors could have also added on the altmetric data of the articles. Altmetrics refer to alternative journal metrics ⁽¹⁾. Altmetric data would further compliment the credibility of the results of the article. Altmetrics measures the online activity around a publication, it’s dissemination and the impact of an article in social media like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. Currently a vast majority of institution repositories and research websites have incorporated altmetrics. Academic altmetric tools such as Mendeley, Research Gate, Academia.edu, CiteUlike are emerging tools of sharing scholarly research ⁽²⁾. The advantages of altmetrics is that it collates the online activity much faster, and seizes the impact of scholarly work on a more diverse platform ⁽³⁾. Neither bibliometrics nor altmetrics is absolutely holistic ⁽⁴⁾. It would be prudent to amalgamate the data of both the journal metrics to analyse and project the impact of a research work.

References

• ¹
  Kolahi J. Altmetrics: A new emerging issue for dental research scientists. Dent Hypotheses 2015;6:1-2.
• ²
  Shekhawat KS, Chauhan A. Altmetrics: A new paradigm for scholarly communication. Indian J Dent Res 2019;30:125-126.
• ³
  Bornmann L, Haunschild R. Do altmetrics correlate with the quality of papers? A large-scale empirical study based on F1000Prime data. PLoS One 2018;13:e0197133.
• ⁴
  Kim K, Chung Y. Overview of journal metrics. Sci Ed 2018;5:16-20.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  02 Nov 2020
• Date of issue
  Sep-Oct 2020

History

• Received
  21 June 2020
• Accepted
  25 Aug 2020