BACKGROUND
Tissue engineering (TE) constitutes a multidisciplinary field aiming to construct artificial tissues to regenerate end-staged organs. Its development has taken placed since the last decade of the 20th century, entailing a clinical revolution. In this sense, TE research groups have worked and shared relevant information in the mass media era. Thus, it would be interesting to study the online dimension of TE research and to compare it with traditional measures of scientific impact.
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate TE online dimension from 2012 to 2018 by using metadata obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) and Altmetrics and to develop a prediction equation for the impact of TE documents from Almetrics scores.
METHODS
We have analyzed 23,719 TE documents through descriptive and statistical methods. First, TE temporal evolution was exposed for WoS and fifteen online platforms (News, Blogs, Policy, Twitter, Patents, Peer review, Weibo, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, F1000, Q&A, Video and Mendeley readers). The 10 most-cited TE original articles were ranked according to WoS citations and the Altmetric Attention Score. Second, in order to better comprehend TE online framework, a correlation and factorial analysis were performed based on the suitable results previously obtained for the Bartlett Sphericity and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin tests. Finally, the liner regression model was applied to elucidate the relation between academy and online media and to construct a prediction equation for TE from Altmetrics data.
RESULTS
TE dynamic shows an upward trend in WoS citations, Twitter, Mendeley Readers and Altmetric Scores. However, WoS and Altmetrics rankings for the most cited documents clearly differs. When compared, the best correlation results were obtained for Mendeley readers and WoS (ρ=0.71). In addition, the factorial analysis identified six factors that could explain the previously observed differences between TE academy, and the online platforms evaluated. At this point, the mathematical model constructed is able to predict and explain more than the 40% of TE WoS citations from Altmetrics scores.
CONCLUSIONS
The scientific information related to the construction of bioartificial tissues increasingly reaches society through different online media. Because of the focus of TE research importantly differs when the academic institutions and online platforms are compared, it could be stated that basic and clinical research groups, academic institutions and health politicians should take it into account in a coordinated effort oriented to the design and implementation of adequate strategies for information diffusion and population health education.
