Social impact of the clinical trials on COVID-19-related vaccines and other drugs

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has focused social attention on biomedicine and drugs. The social attention on papers about drugs for COVID-19 can be measured with altmetrics. This bibliometric alternative estimates the social impact of papers, based on their mentions in social media, traditional media, and other digital platforms.

Objectives: To analyze the social impact of clinical trials on COVID-19-related vaccines and other drugs. To analyze which drugs and academic journals related to these trials have reached the highest social impact.

Methods: We searched the Clarivate Web of Science (WoS) database for academic articles on drugs and covid-19 (TS=drug* and TS=covid-19) and then applied the clinical trial filter. Then, we estimated the social impact of these articles by their Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) using the Altmetric bookmarklet. For the 50 most cited articles in WoS, we also registered all the variables included in the AAS algorithm and other details provided by Altmetric. WoS and Altmetric searches were performed on December 11, 2021.

Results: We identified 627 articles about clinical trials on COVID-19 drugs. The article with the highest AAS was a clinical trial on the Russian vaccine Sputnik V (Gam-COVID-Vac), which is the 10th with the highest AAS of the 20 million articles monitored by Altmetric and with the highest AAS of those in The Lancet. Seven of the 50 most cited articles on clinical trials of COVID-19 drugs are in the Altmetric top 100 of all time. Clinical trials on COVID-19 vaccines accounted for 58.2% of the AAS of the 50 most cited articles, antivirals for 32.1%, immunomodulators (corticosteroids) for 4.5%, monoclonal antibodies for 3.0% and combined therapies for 2.1%. The five drugs with highest AAS were —from higher to lower scoring— tozinameran (Pfizer/BioNtech), ChAdOx1 (AstraZeneca/Oxford) and Gam-COVID-Vac (Sputnik V) vaccines, remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine. Articles published in NEJM (25) and The Lancet (10) account for 82.4% of the AAS of the 50 most cited articles.

Conclusion: Some of the articles on clinical trials of COVID-19 drugs are among the 100 with the highest social impact of the 20 million articles of all time monitored by Altmetric. Vaccine clinical trials had higher social impact than trials on other types of drugs for COVID-19. NEJM and The Lancet have garnered most of the social attention on clinical trials of vaccines and drugs for COVID-19.