Sample
The metadata used in this study were obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection bibliographic database. In this sense, WoS is considered one of the most relevant scientific information sources as it contents reliable evidence about citations, and it is widely used in research evaluations (Bakkalbasi, Bauer, Glover, & Wang, 2006).
The search strategy used in this study was “TISSUE ENGINEER*” or “TISSUE-ENGINEER*’, and it was applied on Science Citation Index (SCI) - Expanded Collection for a period between 2012 and 2018. Once the metadata was extracted, we excluded reviews, book chapters, meeting abstracts, and proceeding articles. Then, original articles obtained from this research were matched with the information available at the Altmetrics web (www.altmetric.com). It holds important social data since 2012 from a much broader sources spectrum than traditional metrics (e.g. web-based references, news media mentions, Twitter mentions or patents, among others) (Trueger et al., 2015).