Are the Research Publications of Top Universities of Iran Mentioned on Social Media? An Altmetric National Scale Study

This research is dedicated to detecting the presence and impact of research outputs published by top universities in Iran using an altmetric approach in order to provide some policy-making solutions to close the gap between universities and society. Based on the ranking of the top 15 universities in Iran using the Islamic World Science Citation (ISC), data from 2000-2023 were obtained by querying the names of each university through the Altmetric Explorer database in May 2024. Data analysis was done using the CRISP-DM model in Python. It became evident that 75,009 articles (20.26%) out of 365, 282 published articles were mentioned on social media, mainly based on Mendeley and Dimensions AI. Moreover, the AAS continuously increased over the years with Engineering, Medical and Health Sciences, and Chemical Sciences gaining maximum attention. The USA, UK, Germany, and other developed high-income countries were identified as the primary mentioning sources. It is expected that the findings of this research, including the relatively low amount of mentions on social media, most of which were for interdisciplinary medical and health-related research, would enrich policymakers and researchers with valuable insights to follow trending topics and journals in order to increase the societal impacts of research publications.