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Abstract

Introduction: There is no information regarding the attention received by scientific information published in Colombian biomedical journals on the internet and social networks.

Objective: Describe the impact of the articles published in these journals using alternative metrics

Methods: Descriptive observational study, including articles published between January 2017 and September 2019 in indexed Colombian biomedical journals registered in Scopus and ISI Web of Science. The mentions registered by the Altmetric tool (number, sources, characteristics of the people who shared the information) were evaluated for each article, and a ranking of the best articles was made.

Results: 2934 articles published in 18 Colombian journals were evaluated. 18.2% had mentions on the network. Most of the mentions appeared on Mendeley (73.8%) and Twitter (18.4%). The journals with the highest proportion of articles mentioned in Altmetric were Biomédica (61.5%), and the Colombian Urology Journals (57.4%) and Psychiatry (30.9%). 82% of the Twitter accounts that shared the information belonged to members of the general public. 46.2% of the users who mentioned the information resided in Colombia. In the ranking of the best articles, the predominant topics were those related to infectology and public health.

Conclusions: Our study suggests that there is room for improvement regarding the dissemination of scientific information on social networks, and on the internet in general, by authors and biomedical journals in Colombia. The evaluations of the care received, using alternative metrics, complement traditional bibliometrics.