TY  - JOUR
AB  - Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to analyze the disciplinary orientation of scientific publications that were mentioned on different social media platforms, focussing on their differences and similarities with citation counts. Design/methodology/approach– Social media metrics and readership counts, associated with 500,216 publications and their citation data from the Web of Science database, were collected from Altmetric.com and Mendeley. Results are presented through descriptive statistical analyses together with science maps generated with VOSviewer. Findings– The results confirm Mendeley as the most prevalent social media source with similar characteristics to citations in their distribution across fields and their density in average values per publication. The humanities, natural sciences, and engineering disciplines have a much lower presence of social media metrics. Twitter has a stronger focus on general medicine and social sciences. Other sources (blog, Facebook, Google+, and news media mentions) are more prominent in regards to multidisciplinary journals. Originality/value– This paper reinforces the relevance of Mendeley as a social media source for analytical purposes from a disciplinary perspective, being particularly relevant for the social sciences (together with Twitter). Key implications for the use of social media metrics on the evaluation of research performance (e.g. the concentration of some social media metrics, such as blogs, news items, etc., around multidisciplinary journals) are identified.
VL  - 67
IS  - 3
SN  - 2050-3806
DO  - 10.1108/AJIM-12-2014-0173
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-12-2014-0173
AU  - Costas Rodrigo
AU  - Zahedi Zohreh
AU  - Wouters Paul
ED  - Dr Stefanie Haustein, Dr Cassidy R. Sugimoto and Dr Vincent Larivière
PY  - 2015
Y1  - 2015/01/01
TI  - The thematic orientation of publications mentioned on social media: Large-scale disciplinary comparison of social media metrics with citations
T2  - Aslib Journal of Information Management
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 260
EP  - 288
Y2  - 2024/04/24
ER  -