International Journal of Clinical Practice: What was hot in 2018?

Should we be measuring downloads, altmetrics, or citations? Last month we reported on a bibliometric experiment examining if articles in the International Journal of Clinical Practice designated as “Editor's Choice” are downloaded more often.1 For the top 10 downloaded articles, also reported were the Altmetric scores and citation rates, measures that summarise an article's potential newsworthiness2 and potential usefulness to other scholars,3 respectively. For this editorial, scheduled for the January 2019 issue, we highlight the most popular articles of 2018 using the metrics of full-text downloads, Altmetric scores, and citation counts. Of the 100 articles available from 2018 (including editorials and letters), the median number of full-text downloads was 143. The article with the highest number of full-text downloads was a review of the current evidence for the treatment of hypothyroidism with levothyroxine/levotriiodothyronine combination therapy vs levothyroxine monotherapy.4 As of mid-November 2018, this article was downloaded as a full text 1882 times (668 times as a PDF document and 1214 times in HTML format). Appearing in the February 2018 issue and available as an Epub since 30 January 2018, the article was made available open access under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, potentially making it more attractive as it permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. For comparison, the runner-up was downloaded as a full text 1074 times and had also appeared in the February 2018 issue, and it too was a review.5 The top 10 downloaded articles were almost exclusively review-type articles, and included publications appearing as late as the July 2018 issue.6 The best performing article in 2018 as measured by the Altmetric score was a retrospective study using the Spanish National Hospital Discharge Database, reporting on the incidence and in-hospital outcomes of Clostridium difficile infection among type 2 diabetes patients.7 The article was published in the October 2018 issue of the journal, having been available online since 14 September 2018. The Altmetric score of 30 placed it in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric. This score was driven by 49 tweeters (including one of the authors of the paper) and one Facebook page (Wiley Health). About 60% of the tweeters came from Spain. Details of the tweets can be found at https://wiley.altmetric.com/details/48404843/twitter, demonstrating the power of promotion and how to use social media effectively by using an infographic, hashtags, pinning the tweet, as well as being an active member of the site. The runner-up received an Altmetric score of 20; it was another report from the same Spanish research group and has been available online since 13 October 2018 but has not yet been assigned an issue.8 Of note, these Altmetric scores of 30 and 20 are substantially higher than the median Altmetric score, 2, for all available articles published in the International Journal of Clinical Practice in 2018 that have Altmetric mentions. Of the three outcomes of full-text downloads, Altmetric scores, and citation counts, citation counts are the most sensitive to time, with the earliest publications appearing in 2018 having the advantage; it takes much longer for another author to notice a paper and cite it than it takes a reader to spot an article of interest and download it. As such, for articles appearing in 2018, the citation rates as of mid-November 2018 were overall low (most were zero). Six publications did receive two citations each,4, 9-13 and with one exception,11 all appeared in the February 2018 issue. The Immediacy Index is the average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published, and the journal Immediacy Index indicates how quickly articles in a journal are cited. This may help identify “hot articles” and “hot journals” in terms of scholarly impact but may not be reflective of the clinical usefulness of a paper or a journal to its readers. For the latter, measuring the number of downloads is more suitable. No external funding or writing assistance was utilised in the production of this editorial. In the past 12 months, Leslie Citrome has served as a consultant to: Acadia, Alkermes, Allergan, Indivior, Intra-Cellular Therapeutics, Janssen, Lundbeck, Merck, Neurocrine, Noven, Otsuka, Pfizer, Shire, Sunovion, Takeda, Teva, Vanda. In the past 12 months, Leslie Citrome has served as a speaker for: Acadia, Alkermes, Allergan, Janssen, Lundbeck, Merck, Neurocrine, Otsuka, Pfizer, Shire, Sunovion, Takeda, Teva, Vanda. Other disclosures: stocks (small number of shares of common stock): Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, J & J, Merck, Pfizer purchased >10 years ago; royalties: Wiley (Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Clinical Practice), UpToDate (reviewer), Springer Healthcare (book).