Can we use link-based indicators to find highly cited publications? The case of the Trust Flow score

The Majestic’s Trust Flow (TF) is a link-based score aimed at measuring the influence of online objects (e.g. scientific publications) by considering the weighted number of links received from trusted websites. This study describes the bibliographic characteristics and impact of those publications with the highest TF score. In order to do this, 20,810 URL-based Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) were identified and analysed. The results show that these DOIs mainly represent recent publications (57.1% of publications were published between 2010 and 2020), journal articles (93.75%) published in the first SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) quartile (81.7%), written with international collaboration (40.4%) and biased towards the field of medicine (36.9%). While the TF score is a discovering tool with the potential to be used in webometric studies to find influential publications, a few technical limitations jeopardise the general applicability of this indicator for research evaluation at the publication level.