Altmetrics of 'altmetrics' using Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google-plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki
📝 Abstract
We measure the impact of “altmetrics” field by deploying altmetrics indicators using the data from Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google-plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki during 2010- 2014. To capture the social impact of scientific publications, we propose an index called alt-index, analogues to h-index. Across the deployed indices, our results have shown high correlation among the indicators that capture social impact. While we observe medium Pearson’s correlation (\r{ho}= .247) among the alt-index and h-index, a relatively high correlation is observed between social citations and scholarly citations (\r{ho}= .646). Interestingly, we find high turnover of social citations in the field compared with the traditional scholarly citations, i.e. social citations are 42.2 % more than traditional citations. The social mediums such as Twitter and Mendeley appear to be the most effective channels of social impact followed by Facebook and Google-plus. Overall, altmetrics appears to be working well in the field of “altmetrics”.
💡 Analysis
We measure the impact of “altmetrics” field by deploying altmetrics indicators using the data from Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google-plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki during 2010- 2014. To capture the social impact of scientific publications, we propose an index called alt-index, analogues to h-index. Across the deployed indices, our results have shown high correlation among the indicators that capture social impact. While we observe medium Pearson’s correlation (\r{ho}= .247) among the alt-index and h-index, a relatively high correlation is observed between social citations and scholarly citations (\r{ho}= .646). Interestingly, we find high turnover of social citations in the field compared with the traditional scholarly citations, i.e. social citations are 42.2 % more than traditional citations. The social mediums such as Twitter and Mendeley appear to be the most effective channels of social impact followed by Facebook and Google-plus. Overall, altmetrics appears to be working well in the field of “altmetrics”.
📄 Content
Pre-Print Version
Altmetrics of “altmetrics” using Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google-plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki
Saeed-Ul Hassan, Uzair Ahmed Gillani
saeed-ul-hassan@itu.edu.pk Information Technology University, 346-B Ferozepur Road, Lahore (Pakistan)
Abstract: We measure the impact of “altmetrics” field by deploying altmetrics indicators using the data from Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google- plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki during 2010- 2014. To capture the social impact of scientific publications, we propose an index called alt-index, analogues to h-index. Across the deployed indices, our results have shown high correlation among the indicators that capture social impact. While we observe medium Pearson’s correlation (ρ= .247) among the alt-index and h-index, a relatively high correlation is observed between social citations and scholarly citations (ρ= .646). Interestingly, we find high turnover of social citations in the field compared with the traditional scholarly citations, i.e. social citations are 42.2% more than traditional citations. The social mediums such as Twitter and Mendeley appear to be the most effective channels of social impact followed by Facebook and Google-plus. Overall, altmetrics appears to be working well in the field of “altmetrics”.
Keywords: Altmetrics, Social Media, Usage Indicators, Alt-index
Pre-Print Version
Introduction In scholarly world, altmetrics are getting popularity as to support and/or alternative to traditional citation-based evaluation metrics such as impact factor, h-index etc. (Priem et. al., 2010). The concept of altmetrics was initially proposed in 2010 as a generalization of article level metrics and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag (McIntyre et al, 2011). In recent years, social media has dramatically impacted research workflow - scholars prefer to discuss and share their work on social media platforms like twitter with hashtags to reach relevant audience, Facebook and Google- plus to share it with their social circle or beyond. In addition, scholars have started extensively using mediums like Mendeley to organize social references and CiteULike to bookmark papers related to their interest (Haustein & Siebenlist, 2011; Nielsen, 2007).
Naturally scholars want to remain updated in their field of research and take interest in latest articles only, but existing citation process need time to accrue, thus, this is what motivates scholars to move towards altmetrics domain (Priem & Berge, 2010). Altmetrics is basically count of citations or mention over social media platforms (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Mendeley etc.) and considered as an alternative to existing scholarly measurements. Since a new publication may appear more rapidly on the social media platforms, e.g. it is more reasonable to expect tweets and blogs mentions related to any article on its publication day or within one month of its publication. Hence social media platforms are considered to be a valuable tool for scholars trying to promote their research publication in less time. We have number of websites Pre-Print Version
providing altmetrics tracking with free and paid plans (e.g. impactstory.com, altmetrics.com, etc.)
Alternative metrics or commonly called as “altmetrics” are usually build on information from social media usage, and we could employ it side-by-side with citation-based metrics. Since the inception of “altmetrics”, a vast group of scholars are debating that altmetrics could deliver information about the impact on diverse communities like clinicians, practitioners, and the general public as well as help to track the use of diverse research products like datasets, software and blog posts (Brody et al, 2006). Given the amount of efforts being invested in this field, it becomes extremely important to measure the impact of “altmetrics”. This paper provides a brief overview of “altmetrics” field by deploying known altmetrics indicators. In addition, we also propose a measure of alt-index, analogous to traditional h-index, which captures the social impact of scholarly publications.
The rest of the article is organized as follows. In the next section, we discuss related studies. We then proceed with explaining the altmetrics indicators we use for this study. Further we present a case study of scholars in the field of “altmetrics”. Finally, we present conclusions along with directions for future work.
Literature Review Usage of citation metrics has significant importance for the measurement of research impact, but this method has some inherited limitations. The process of finding citation latency of even high impact articles is a bit time taking process and usually first citations appear in 1-2 years or even longer (Pavitt, 1985). Citations are normally used Pre-Print Version
to measure only one type of research products while
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