Public interest in social research ethics: An analysis of the top 50 articles in Altmetric database

Abstract

Social media influences public awareness, politics, and the economy. A new web-based metric called Altmetric has recently been developed for use in scientific fields, which provides a complementary measure of the impact of scientific articles. This study aims to identify and characterise the top 50 articles with high Altmetric attention scores (AASs) in social research ethics, which have received the most significant amount of attention from the general public and scholars. Using the Altmetric database, we searched for 438 AAS articles with content in social research ethics, which were published in 172 journals in social sciences using the Web of Science and Scopus databases. We determined the top 50 articles with the highest AASs using the Altmetric.com databases and then analysed them with some criteria of the journal, year, type of article, a field of research, main topic, and ethical research consideration. Among the 50 chosen articles, the journal that published the most articles on social research ethics that received the most attention on social media was the International Journal of Social Research Methodology (n=7). The most frequent keywords appearing in these articles are ethics (n=20), research ethics (n=14), social media (n=13), and privacy (n=7). Articles in the journal with higher impact factors (IFs) and Scimagor’s ranks were expected to have higher AASs. The research areas with articles with high AASs are philosophy and religious study (27), medical, pharmacology and health sciences, and studies in human society. Our study presents a detailed list and analysis of the top 50 articles with the highest AASs in social research ethics, which paint a significant picture of public attention in social research ethics. Indeed, this picture shows that despite having public interests in this topic, the level is less considerable compared to its vital position in social research in contemporary life.