Exploring the Altmetric Insights into Deepfake Research: A Study of Social Engagement of Highly Cited Publications

Deepfake technology has been a major topic of research, discussions, and debates in recent times. Because of its immense and direct social impact, understanding the social attention of deepfake research is important. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the social attention of the most impactful deepfake research using altmetric indicators. The bibliographic data for the study were gathered from the Scopus database. Altmetric.com was accessed using the API to collect Altmetric data, while Python and SPSS software were applied for the analyses. The study's findings revealed that, soon after the emergence of deepfakes, research publications, citations, and altmetric attention scores (AAS) rose exponentially. The study also detected a significant amount of social media attention attracted by deepfake research works, finding Twitter and Madeley as the major platforms. The correlation analyses showed a moderate association between Scopus citations and Mendeley reader counts. Citations, AAS and AAS, and Mendeley were weakly correlated. The results showed that deepfake research received uneven but significant online attention. The present study revealed dimensions of impact not captured by citation counts alone, which could be beneficial for the researchers, policymakers, and communication strategies.