Changes in Social Media Impact of the Radiological Literature During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Purpose: The objective of this study was to determine how the social media impact of the radiological literature has changed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Methods: Altmetric Attention scores were collected for all articles in five leading radiology journals over a 5-year period ending in June 2020, and temporal smoothing yielded the filtered Altmetric Attention (fAA) score. Natural language processing methods were used to label articles with major topic areas. A forecasting model was used to identify periods of outlier behavior in the fAA score aggregated across all journals, for each journal individually, and stratified by article topic area. The distributions of fAA scores prior to the onset of the pandemic were statistically compared to those during the pandemic. For journals exhibiting increased fAA scores, the frequency distributions of articles not related to Covid-19 was compared to that prior to the pandemic.

Results: During the pandemic, we found sustained outliers and statistically significant increases in the aggregate fAA score across all five journals, as well as for Radiology, American Journal of Roentgenology, and Academic Radiology individually. Articles related to Covid-19, thoracic imaging, and radiology education also experienced significantly increased fAA scores during the pandemic period. We did not find significantly decreased rates of publication of non-Covid articles in the journals experiencing elevated fAA scores.

Conclusion: Social media engagement with the radiological literature significantly increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. This preferentially affected certain journals and articles addressing specific topics, reflecting the intense public interest in the diagnosis and treatment of Covid-19.