CONSORT Abstract Item Reporting Quality and Altmetrics in the Cardiovascular Core Clinical Journals

The purpose of this study was to assess the CONSORT abstract item reporting quality in the cardiovascular articles published in the core clinical journals and its relation with altmetrics score. The study has conducted on the abstracts of 492 articles on cardiovascular diseases published in the core clinical journals in Medline in 2015. The abstracts of these articles were scored based on the CONSORT checklist. The altmetrics score and its sources were extracted using Altmetric Bookmarklet. Descriptive statistics and Spearman’s correlation coefficient were used to analyze the data. No article had considered all the items of the CONSORT checklist. Of all 17 points in the CONSORT checklist, the articles’ highest score was 15, with a mean of 7.57. The criteria related to the participants (98.6%), interventions (95.5%), purposes and outcomes (96.1%), and conclusion (96.3%) were reported appropriately. The highest score of altmetric was 1164, with a mean of 59.61 and a median of 10. There was a direct and meaningful relationship between the CONSORT and altmetrics score (ρ =0.514, P<0.001). The abstracts with higher reporting quality received higher altmetrics score; thus, they were likely to receive more attention from researchers and the public on the web and social networks. Conducting training courses for researchers and reviewers of articles and asking journal editors to follow the checklist items will increase the reporting quality of abstracts and maybe the altmetrics scores.

Keywords: Altmetrics, Cardiovascular articles, CONSORT, Quality of Reports, Randomized clinical trials.