Measuring Social Media Activity of Scientific Literature: An Exhaustive Comparison of Scopus and Novel Altmetrics Big Data
📝 Abstract
This paper measures social media activity of 15 broad scientific disciplines indexed in Scopus database using Altmetric.com data. First, the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database is investigated, overall and across disciplines. Second, the correlation between the bibliometric and altmetric indices is examined using Spearman correlation. Third, a zero-truncated negative binomial model is used to determine the association of various factors with increasing or decreasing citations. Lastly, the effectiveness of altmetric indices to identify publications with high citation impact is comprehensively evaluated by deploying Area Under the Curve (AUC) - an application of receiver operating characteristic. Results indicate a rapid increase in the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database from 10.19% in 2011 to 20.46% in 2015. A zero-truncated negative binomial model is implemented to measure the extent to which different bibliometric and altmetric factors contribute to citation counts. Blog count appears to be the most important factor increasing the number of citations by 38.6% in the field of Health Professions and Nursing, followed by Twitter count increasing the number of citations by 8% in the field of Physics and Astronomy. Interestingly, both Blog count and Twitter count always show positive increase in the number of citations across all fields. While there was a positive weak correlation between bibliometric and altmetric indices, the results show that altmetric indices can be a good indicator to discriminate highly cited publications, with an encouragingly AUC= 0.725 between highly cited publications and total altmetric count. Overall, findings suggest that altmetrics could better distinguish highly cited publications.
💡 Analysis
This paper measures social media activity of 15 broad scientific disciplines indexed in Scopus database using Altmetric.com data. First, the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database is investigated, overall and across disciplines. Second, the correlation between the bibliometric and altmetric indices is examined using Spearman correlation. Third, a zero-truncated negative binomial model is used to determine the association of various factors with increasing or decreasing citations. Lastly, the effectiveness of altmetric indices to identify publications with high citation impact is comprehensively evaluated by deploying Area Under the Curve (AUC) - an application of receiver operating characteristic. Results indicate a rapid increase in the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database from 10.19% in 2011 to 20.46% in 2015. A zero-truncated negative binomial model is implemented to measure the extent to which different bibliometric and altmetric factors contribute to citation counts. Blog count appears to be the most important factor increasing the number of citations by 38.6% in the field of Health Professions and Nursing, followed by Twitter count increasing the number of citations by 8% in the field of Physics and Astronomy. Interestingly, both Blog count and Twitter count always show positive increase in the number of citations across all fields. While there was a positive weak correlation between bibliometric and altmetric indices, the results show that altmetric indices can be a good indicator to discriminate highly cited publications, with an encouragingly AUC= 0.725 between highly cited publications and total altmetric count. Overall, findings suggest that altmetrics could better distinguish highly cited publications.
📄 Content
1 Measuring Social Media Activity of Scientific Literature: An Exhaustive Comparison of Scopus and Novel Altmetrics Big Data
Saeed-Ul Hassana, Mubashir Imrana, Uzair Gillania, Naif Radi Aljohanib, Timothy D. Bowmanc, Fereshteh Didegahd
a Information Technology University, 346-B, Ferozepur Road, Lahore, Pakistan E-mail address: saeed-ul-hassan@itu.edu.pk, Tel: + 92-322-228-9756
b Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia E-mail address: nraljohani@kau.edu.sa
c School of Library and Information Science, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, United States E-mail address: timothy.d.bowman@wayne.edu
d Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada E-mail address: fdidegah@sfu.ca
Abstract This paper measures social media activity of 15 broad scientific disciplines indexed in Scopus database using Altmetric.com data. First, the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database is investigated, overall and across disciplines. Second, the correlation between the bibliometric and altmetric indices is examined using Spearman correlation. Third, a zero-truncated negative binomial model is used to determine the association of various factors with increasing or decreasing citations. Lastly, the effectiveness of altmetric indices to identify publications with high citation impact is comprehensively evaluated by deploying Area Under the Curve (AUC) - an application of receiver operating characteristic. Results indicate a rapid increase in the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database from 10.19% in 2011 to 20.46% in 2015. A zero-truncated negative binomial model is implemented to measure the extent to which different bibliometric and altmetric factors contribute to citation counts. Blog count appears to be the most important factor increasing the number of citations by 38.6% in the field of Health Professions and Nursing, followed by Twitter count increasing the number of citations by 8% in the field of Physics and Astronomy. Interestingly, both Blog count and Twitter count always show positive increase in the number of citations across all fields. While there was a positive weak correlation between bibliometric and altmetric indices, the results show that altmetric indices can be a good indicator to discriminate highly cited publications, with an encouragingly AUC= 0.725 between highly cited publications and total altmetric count. Overall, findings suggest that altmetrics could better distinguish highly cited publications.
Keywords: Altmetrics, Scopus, Comparative analysis, Research evaluation
2 Introduction Online social media applications have attracted a tremendous number of users by providing them with a unique context in which to interact with like-minded people (Priem and Hemminger 2010; Wouters and Costas 2012). Social media networks afford users the ability to share ideas and receive an immediate response to their sharing activities. Due to its rapid response capabilities, social media applications have attracted the attention of the scientific community, who, parallel to traditional (i.e. bibliometrics) forms of scholarly communication, are now using these online contexts to disseminate research in their daily scholarly practices (Thelwall et al. 2013).
In 2010, the term altmetrics was proposed as another form of collecting article level metrics in a manner that would allow for more timely measurements of interest in scholarly documents and as a means to filter the vast amount of information being disseminated online (Priem et al. 2010). Since the introduction of the term altmetrics to the Scientometrics community, scholars have been exploring the possible analytics that this online activity can offer and the impact it may have on the diverse communities within and outside the academic community including clinicians, practitioners, and the general public (see Sugimoto et al. (2017) for an extended review of altmetrics literature).
To be specific, altmetric data is used to track the use of scientific research in a variety of online platforms including, but not limited to, news sites, social media platforms, blogs, video sites, and reference management tools. In this way, altmetrics analyzes the real-time sharing of scientific documents based on various online actions, which can include comments, discussions, likes, shares, and bookmarks. (Zahedi et al. 2014).
3 Social media applications have noticeably impacted scholarly communication behaviors and expectations. Scholars may discuss and share their work on Twitter using a hashtag to signal that their work is relevant for a specific audience. Similarly, Facebook and Google+ can be utilized to share scholarly information within and outside of a user’s immediate social network. Scholars are using social reference managers, such as Mendeley or Zotero, t
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