In this analysis of major pulmonary and critical care journals the correlation between traditional publishing metrics and Altmetric Attention Scores (AAS) was fair, with a strong positive correlation between citations and AASs for all journals, negative correlations between Eigenfactor and AASs for most journals, and no clear association between Impact Factor (IF) and AAS.

Additionally, there was no significant change in the traditional publishing metrics for these journals over the last decade, although there was a significant increase in AASs.

This likely reflects expanded discussion of articles online and on social media, platforms that are not captured by traditional publication metrics.

Our findings open the forum for further discussion regarding how the impact of an academic output should be assessed.

We anticipate that alternative metrics will gain prominence in supplementing traditional metrics for the purpose of demonstrating impact of a publication in academic circles and the medical community as well as that of authors with a role in advancement and promotion of faculty.

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