OrthoSpineNews reports on a study published in Arthroscopy by a team of researchers including Kyle Kunze, MD, orthopedic resident at HSS, which set out to determine if orthopedic randomized controlled trials (RCTs) would garner as much attention as non-orthopedic RCTs.

The team compared the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) and citation rates between orthopedic and non-orthopedic RCTs from five high-impact medical journals: The New England Journal of Medicine), Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, Annals of Internal Medicine, and Archives of Internal Medicine between January 2011-December 2016. They then identified general characteristics of these articles that were associated with greater exposure on social media; 9 orthopedic and 59 non-orthopedic RCTs were included.

“The main findings were that (1) orthopedic randomized controlled trials on average garnered significantly more attention on social media than did randomized controlled trials pertaining to other disciplines in medicine, particularly on Twitter and Facebook; and (2) orthopedic studies pertaining to non-operative management had greater attention on social media than did orthopaedic studies that investigated the effect of a surgical intervention,” cited Dr. Kunze.

“Orthopedic surgeons, researchers and providers who publish RCTs in high impact medical journals can anticipate extensive social media attention for their articles relative to other non-orthopaedic RCTs in the same journals. Social media attention may be related to operative versus non-operative management topics. This study provides further evidence for the increasing use of the Altmetrics Attention Score (a metric of social media attention) and its association with citation accrual,” said Dr. Kunze.

Read the full article in Orthospinenews.com.