Forty-seven years of Iranian cardiovascular disease scientific publication: A bibliometric and altmetric analysis.

Background: The present study was conducted to investigate the scientific contributions of Iranians in the field of cardiovascular research, as indexed in the Scopus database, using bibliometric and altmetric methods.

Methods: This applied study was conducted with a scientometric approach, utilizing bibliometric and altmetric indicators. The research population consisted of the scientific works of Iranian researchers in the field of cardiovascular diseases, indexed in the Scopus database over a period of 47 years. For bibliometric analysis and the generation of co-citation, co-occurrence, and co-authorship maps, the authors employed VOS Viewer software and the bibliometrix package in the R programming language. In the final stage, articles mentioned on social media were analyzed and evaluated using an altmetric approach.

Results: The results indicated that the commencement point for the publication of documents was 1975, and there has been a steep increase in recent years. Moreover, the documents were primarily research articles out of 6853 retrieved documents, and a limited number of documents were single-authored. Other findings also revealed the co-authorship map of authors and the co-occurrence of words, highly cited authors and institutions, and highly frequent keywords, signifying the scientific collaboration of Iranian researchers with the United States and England. Altmetric analysis also demonstrated that 43.41% of documents were shared at least once on social media and had an Altmetric Attention score. Furthermore, the analysis of altmetric indices showed that Mendeley, Twitter, and News had the highest share of document mentions on social media, respectively.

Conclusion: The findings of the study can offer valuable information to researchers, managers, and policy makers to become aware of the current state of research in the field of cardiovascular diseases and implement the necessary policies to inform society and enhance public health status.