The Top 100 Spine Surgery Articles on Social Media: An Altmetric Study

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