†These authors contributed equally.
Academic Editor: Peter A. McCullough
Background: Citations are used to assess the importance of authors,
articles and journals in the scientific community, but do not examine how they
affect general public journal readership. The Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) is
a new metric for measuring media attention of the published paper.
Methods: We examined cardiovascular (CV) randomized clinical trials
(RCTs), published in the 3 highest Web of Science Impact Factor journals (Journal
Citation Reports 2019: category “Medicine, General & Internal”) and in the 3
highest Web of Science Impact Factor CV journals (Journal Citation Reports 2019:
category “Cardiac & Cardiovascular Systems”), through the calendar year of
2017, 2018 and 2019. The primary outcomes were the assessment of the difference
between number of citations and AAS among positive and negative CV RCTs.
Results: Among the included 262 RCTs, more positive CV RCTs were
published (p = 0.002). There was no significant statistical difference
between the positive and negative trials, considering the number of citations
(p = 0.61). Interestingly, positive trials had a tendency towards a
higher AAS (p = 0.058). The correlation between the AAS and the number
of citations was moderate positively correlated (
