The Online Attention to Spiritual Health Research: An Altmetric Analysis

Introduction: As a multidisciplinary field of study, spiritual health attracted the great attention of scholars all over the world. This altmetric survey aimed to investigate the attention to papers published on the field in online social media. Material and Methods: Including all papers on spiritual health indexed in Scopus, related keywords were searched in Altmetric Explorer for measuring Altmetric attention scores and Scopus, Google scholar and dimensions for citation counts of the papers. Collected data was analyzed with SPSS. Results: Out of 12,576 papers, only 4,804 papers (38.19%) had Altmetric attention scores. The majority of papers (n=3,957; 82.36%) had Altmetric attention scores between 1 and 10. 5,706 papers (45.37%) were shared in Mendeley as the top-ranked mentioning social media, followed by Twitter by including 3,929 papers (31.24%) and Facebook with 1,016 papers (8.07%). Regrading event counts, Mendeley ranked first with 331,221 events and mean event rate of 58.04 events per paper, followed by News with 4,093 events and Twitter with 3,464 events. The first-ranked journal in total mentions was the Journal of Psychopharmacology from the UK, with 3,156 mentions of its 19 papers. PLOS ONE from the USA ranked second with 50 papers mentioned 1,763 times. The third rank belonged to the Journal of Religion & Health with 184 papers mentioned 879 times. The USA ranked first in Twitter with 7,457 tweets from 3,938 unique profiles, in Facebook with 300 posts from 184 unique profiles and again in News with 2,680 news stories from 529 unique news outlets, and in Policy, the UK ranked first with 148 policy documents. Top-ranked papers in Altmetric attention scores were of relatively high-cited papers published in high-prestige journals. Conclusion: This study explored main altmetric indicators of the papers published on spiritual health as an ever-increasing considered topic for the first time and can be a guide for readers, researchers, authors and administrators interesting the field.