Measuring social media attention of scientific research on Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): An investigation on article-level metrics data of Dimensions CURRENT STATUS:

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the rate of attention to the scientific productions on COVID-19 in social media over a period of four months. The present research was an applied descriptive-analytical study that used Scientometrics analysis. The population study included research papers about the COVID-19 indexed in Dimensions platform from December 2019 to March 2020. Information of 20% of the articles with the highest citation count and 20% of the articles with the highest number of Altmetric Attention Score (AAS), including title, journal, citation and Altmetrics indicators for each article were extracted. These data were analyzed by SPSS 16.0. The results showed that 1910 scientific productions about the COVID-19 were indexed in the Dimensions platform. A considerable number of these articles were accessible via preprint services and were published in journals such as The Lancet, JAMA, BMJ and NEJM. Authors from China and Japan were the most active authors. All of the 382 articles had AAS, that is, all of these articles received attention at least in one of the social media. The highest and lowest AAS for these articles were 14030 and 6, respectively. These results show a high rate of attention by researches and users of social media to the articles presented on COVID-19 . The result of this research also showed a significant positive relationship between the citations and Altmetric indicators. As the results of this research showed, the “information supply” in the field of COVID-19 was remarkably high. Also, the “information demand” by the social media audiences was high. diagnosis, epidemiology, transmission, prevention, control and its treatment.

Introduction are more realistic to evaluate the research impact. Web resources such as social media are recently used as a complementary tool for evaluation of research activities. They can provide a broader image of scientific impact due to increasing popularity among people (Priem et al. 2012). The interactions of users within the social media have the potential to provide valuable data for evaluation (Neylon and Wu 2009). This attribute results in the creation of new indicators to assess the impact of the articles; thus, it has led to the emergence Altmetrics. The Altmetrics is one of the means to evaluate and trace science influence on the social web. The purpose of its formation is to present the invisible influence of scientific publications by the use of Altmetrics indicators such as visits, downloads, bookmarks, favorites, mention, and article capture based on the social web data. Altmetrics may be useful for tracking real-time usage of the latest publications, recording usage statistics of online resources, finding how research has been used by researchers and the public and predicting future citations.
One of the environments used for Altmetrics studies and article impact assessment is the Dimensions platform (https://app.dimensions.ai/). This tool provides access to data related to the presence and attention received by the scientific products in different social media such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Policy document, Blog, News, and so on. Also, the main indicator of Dimension is Altmetric Attention Score (AAS). The AAS is calculated by summing each indicator multiplied by its weight with necessary adjustments, and the AAS are updated in real-time (Huang et al. 2018 The purpose of this research was to evaluate the rate of attention to the scientific productions on COVID-19 in social media. Considering the importance of the subject, the present study investigated the number of indexed articles related to COVID-19 in Dimension platform over a period of four months, the number of citations received by these articles, and the amount of attention paid to them by social media audiences to determine the real-time impact of the scientific productions on COVID-19; Thus, the purpose of this research was twofold: first to describe the distribution of the scientific productions that are known as the concept of "information supply" during the last few months; second to determine how many of these articles took more attention by the users in a short period under the concept of "information demand".

Research Methodology
The present research was an applied descriptive-analytical study that used scientometrics analysis.
Preprint servers are online archives, or repositories, containing works or data associated with various scholarly papers that are not yet peer-reviewed or accepted by academic journals. The journals including Lancet, BMJ, Journal of Medical Virology, NEJM and JAMA were in subsequent rankings. Table   1 shows the most active authors in this field.   (Table 3).
The highest citations are 472 and the least citation is one.     Overall, these articles were cited 5521 times; the mean value of citation to every one of these articles was 14.4 times. Tables 5 shows that the "Twitter" indicator with 335616 times had the highest frequency followed by the "News" and "Facebook" indicators, respectively. All of the 382 articles had AAS, that is, every one of these articles received attention at least in one of the social media. The highest and lowest AAS for these articles were 14030 and 1, respectively. Table 6 presents the information of Citation and Altmetrics indicators of articles with the highest AAS. Table 6 presents the information of Citation and Altmetrics indicators of articles with the highest AAS. The total AAS for these articles was 556219 with the mean value of 1004.4 per article. Table 6 shows that the "Twitter" indicator had the highest number with 556219 times followed by the "News" and "Facebook" indicators, respectively. All of the 382 articles had AAS, that is, every one of these articles received attention at least in one of the social media. The highest and lowest AAS for these articles were 14030 and 6, respectively. Overall, 61.5% of these articles were cited at least "one" time.  The result of the Spearman correlation indicated that there was a positive significant relationship between all the indicators (p<0.05). versions of their papers to the preprint server at any time. Preprint servers are a great way for researchers to share and receive feedback on scholarly works in progress. Therefore, a preprint is a full draft research paper that is shared publicly before it becomes peer-reviewed. Most preprints are given a DOI; so that they may be cited in other research papers (Mudrak 2020

Conclusion
The Corona Virus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) epidemic by 2019-nCoV is spreading worldwide. To acquire knowledge and information on COVID-19, numerous researchers started to research in this field over a period of four months. The results of this research showed that the "information supply" in the field of COVID-19 in different aspects of this disease was remarkably high. Also, the "information demand" by the social media audiences were high in such a way that many of these articles attracted social media audiences over the past few months. While some of these articles were accessible via preprint services. This result illustrates the importance of preprinting services in increasing the visibility of scientific products. Therefore, the results of this study showed that posting a preprint led to a significant increase in Altmetric attention scores and citations. The result of the research also showed that there was a significant positive relationship between the Citation and Altmetrics indicators; Therefore, the activities of researchers on social media have the potential to increase the visibility of scientific works. It is recommended that researchers use this social media as a means of "self-archiving". The present research is one of the first scientometrics study about articles on COVID-19 by using Dimensions tool. We suggest that the scientific productions presented about COVID-19 in other platforms and databases be examined and their result be compared with the result of the present research.

Conflicts of interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest