Introduction

Rotator cuff tears are one of the most common injuries evaluated by orthopaedic sports medicine physicians. While publications pertaining to the rotator cuff may be of interest to members of the scientific community as well as the general public, bibliometric data (e.g. citation analysis) may not accurately evaluate the dissemination of published articles through newer forms of online media. The Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) includes, but is not limited to news mentions, Twitter, Facebook, and mentions in blog posts. The purpose of our study was to evaluate the 100 articles with the highest AAS pertaining to the rotator cuff and compare their characteristics to the most-cited rotator cuff articles in scientific literature.

Methods

We performed an article extraction using Altmetric Explorer with PubMed MeSH terms, “supraspinatus”, “infraspinatus”, “subscapularis”, “teres minor”, and “rotator cuff.” The top 100 articles with the highest scores were included for analysis. The following data elements were extracted for each included article: title, article type, article topic, year of publication, journal name, authors, institutional affiliations, and online mentions (i.e. the number of times the article was mentioned in news, blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia sources). The geographic origin of each article was also determined by the institutional affiliation of the first author, which was categorized as American (originating in the United States), European (originating in Europe), or other.

Results

The 100 articles with the highest AAS were published between 2009 and 2020. AAS ranged from 47 to 676 (median=74.5, 25th percentile = 59.5, 75th percentile = 114.5). The selected articles were most frequently published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine (13), the Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery (11), and the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (7). The most common article type was Systematic Review/Meta-Analysis (29%). The most impactful rotator cuff article in online media was a review article entitled “Rotator cuff related shoulder pain: assessment, management, and uncertainties”. This article was published in the journal Manual Therapy in 2016 and had an AAS score of 676. The top 3 AAS articles were all published by authors based in Europe. The online media source that correlated most strongly with AAS was Twitter mentions (r=.9007, r2 2 =.8112).

Conclusion

The present study used AAS to identify the top 100 most impactful rotator cuff articles in online media. These articles differ from top-cited articles by article type, article topic, geographic origin, and journal of publication. Of all online media sources, Twitter correlated most strongly with AAS score. Further investigation is needed to characterize the factors underlying these trends, as well as to determine the optimal strategies for disseminating orthopaedic literature in online media.