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This paper aims to highlight the productivity and collaborative features of Mendeley, a reference management tool, as well as recommendations on how Mendeley can be incorporated into an information literacy program.

Results from a literature review and feedback from students and faculty were used to provide background for this paper. Mendeley's features and potential benefits to librarians and researchers are discussed.

Feedback from students and faculty who use Mendeley are very positive owing to its productivity and social networking and collaboration features. The literature highlights Mendeley's usefulness in the context of citation management software.

The paper provides useful tips and best practices for integrating Mendeley into information literacy sessions and workshops for students and faculty. The paper also discusses how teaching Mendeley can facilitate scholarly communication between researchers and broaden the role of librarians on campus.

The paper shows that Mendeley enables higher level information literacy by helping users focus on locating and organizing information and spend less time on citation details. Mendeley's social networking features are compatible with emerging work practices, facilitating collaboration among researchers through group's functions and open sharing of information through groups and publication lists.

Mendeley reader counts have been proposed as early indicators for the impact of academic publications. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether there are enough Mendeley readers for research evaluation purposes during the month when an article is first published.

Average Mendeley reader counts were compared to the average Scopus citation counts for 104,520 articles from ten disciplines during the second half of 2016.

Articles attracted, on average, between 0.1 and 0.8 Mendeley readers per article in the month in which they first appeared in Scopus. This is about ten times more than the average Scopus citation count.

Other disciplines may use Mendeley more or less than the ten investigated here. The results are dependent on Scopus’s indexing practices, and Mendeley reader counts can be manipulated and have national and seniority biases.

Mendeley reader counts during the month of publication are more powerful than Scopus citations for comparing the average impacts of groups of documents but are not high enough to differentiate between the impacts of typical individual articles.

This is the first multi-disciplinary and systematic analysis of Mendeley reader counts from the publication month of an article.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the research impact of the National Research Foundation (NRF)-rated researchers’ output at the North-West University (NWU), South Africa, from 2006 to 2017.

The study used bibliometrics and altmetrics methods to determine the production of research outputs and the impact of NWU’s NRF-rated researchers’ publications. Various tools including Google Scholar (GS), Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, ResearchGate (RG) and Mendeley were used to collect data. The citations in the three bibliographic databases were used as proxy for academic impact, while reads and readerships in RG and Mendeley were used to determine societal impact of the researchers. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to test the relationship between citations in the three bibliographic databases and reads and readerships in RG and Mendeley.

The main findings were that the majority of NWU’s NRF-rated researchers’ publications emanated from GS, followed by Scopus and then WoS. GS output also had more citations. There were 6,026 research outputs in RG which were read for 676,919 times and 5,850 in Mendeley with 142,621 readerships. Correlations between RG and all three bibliographic databases’ citations were scant. Strong relationships between the three bibliographic databases’ citations and Mendeley readerships were found.

Academic librarians who interact with researchers who would like to predict future academic impact of their documents can be advised to consider Mendeley readerships with some level of confidence compared to RG reads. These results point to the importance of constant self-evaluation by researchers to ensure that they have balanced profiles across the three main bibliographic databases that are also considered for ratings. These results point to the relevancy of GS to evaluate research beyond the academy.

The fact that researchers are contributing research that seeks to improve the general welfare of the population (beyond the academy) is a positive sign as society look up to researchers and research to solve their socio-economic problems. Social media play an important role as they serve as indicators that indicators point to wider research impacts and wider access by many different groups of people including the members of society at large. They point to research that is accessible to not only researchers and those who have access to their research but also the society at large.

Although the practice of rating researchers is common in different research ecosystems, the researchers could not find any evidence of studies conducted using a combination of bibliometrics and altmetrics to asses rated researchers’ output. This study covers and compares social impact based on data obtained from two academic social media sites and three main bibliographic databases (GS, Scopus and WoS).

Social media has given way for the development of various new altmetric indicators. Mendeley readership count is one such indicator. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the paper aims to investigate the relationship between citation counts and Mendeley readership counts. The paper also evaluates the relationship between Mendeley readership metrics for two different time periods, thereby investigating its nature as an altmetric indicator.

Data were collected using the Scopus database. Top 100 papers in Physics published during 2005 as well as in 2010 that received the largest number of citations were selected. Mendeley readership data were collected using Mendeley readership statistics for documents indexed in Scopus. For establishing a relationship between citation counts and Mendeley readership, correlation was calculated between the citations in Scopus database and Mendeley readership. The difference in Mendeley readership for different time periods was also investigated.

The paper showed that for both the years, Mendeley readership counts were in positive correlation with citation counts. For the year 2010, it was found that Mendeley readership counts were in strong positive correlation with citation counts, whereas for 2005, they were in moderate positive correlation.

One of the limitations of this paper is that with time more scientists and researchers may join Mendeley causing various changes in data and giving different results. Also, the paper has focused on the highly cited papers in Physics.

Very few studies have been conducted in the area of altmetrics, as it is a comparatively new and emerging field of research. The findings of this paper offer insights to the question whether Mendeley readership counts can be used as an alternative to traditional sources of bibliometric indicators like citations, h-index, etc. The paper also evaluates the difference in the nature of traditional bibliometric indicators and Mendeley readership counts.

The rapid spread and severity of the coronavirus (COVID-19) virus have prompted a spate of scholarly research that deals with the pandemic. The purpose of this study is to measure and assess the coverage of COVID-19 research on social media and the engagement of readers with COVID-19 research on social media outlets.

An altmetric analysis was carried out in three phases. The first focused on retrieving all papers related to COVID-19. Phase two of the research aimed to measure the presence of the retrieved papers on social media using altmetric application programming interface (API). The third phase aimed to measure Mendeley readership categories using Mendeley API to extract data of readership from Mendeley for each paper.

The study suggests that while social media platforms do not give accurate measures of the impact as given by citations, they can be used to portray the social impact of the scholarly outputs and indicate the effectiveness of COVID-19 research. The results confirm a positive correlation between the number of citations to articles in databases such as Scopus and the number of views on social media sites such as Mendeley and Twitter. The results of the current study indicated that social media could serve as an indicator of the number of citations of scientific articles.

This study’s limitation is that the studied articles’ altmetrics performance was examined using only one of the altmetrics data service providers (altmetrics database). Hence, future research should explore altmetrics on the topic using more than one platform. Another limitation of the current research is that it did not explore the academic social media role in spreading fake information as the scope was limited to scholarly outputs on social media. The practical contribution of the current research is that it informs scholars about the impact of social media platforms on the spread and visibility of COVID-19 research. Also, it can help researchers better understand the importance of published COVID-19 research using social media.

This paper provides insight into the impact of COVID-19 research on social media. The paper helps to provide an understanding of how people engage with health research using altmetrics scores, which can be used as indicators of research performance.

The purpose of the study is to use a multidimensional perspective on the analysis of scholarly articles published in the top-tier Library and Information Science (LIS) journals. The relationships between the impact factors (Altmetric attention score [AAS], citation count and Mendeley readership) were analyzed, and reader profiles were characterized and studied.

This paper examined citation count, AAS and Mendeley readership of the most cited articles published in the top-tier LIS journals – The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Government Information Quarterly and Library and Information Science Research. A total of 61 articles were analyzed. Data were recorded on an Excel spreadsheet and exported to the statistical software package SPSS 18.0 for Windows to perform the descriptive and correlation analysis.

This study suggests that Mendeley readership and AAS could be used as supplemental measurements for assessing the impact of a publication or author in the LIS. AAS and Mendeley readership are positively correlated with citation count, and the correlation between Mendeley readership and citation count was stronger than AAS and citation count. Librarians are dominant readers of the top-tier LIS journals, followed by social sciences, computer science and arts and humanities professions.

This study introduces two newly launched metrics for measuring the research impact factor and discusses how they correlated with citation count. Moreover, the study details the spectrum of Altmetric for discovering readership of LIS top-tier journals. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that presents the spectrum of AAS and Mendeley readership of the most cited articles published in top-tier of LIS journals. The study reveals an alternative way of measuring LIS publication’s impact factor that enables researchers, librarians, administrators, publishers and other stakeholders in LIS to assess the influence of a publication from another angle.

The introduction of “altmetrics” as new tools to analyze scientific impact within the reward system of science has challenged the hegemony of citations as the predominant source for measuring scientific impact. Mendeley readership has been identified as one of the most important altmetric sources, with several features that are similar to citations. The purpose of this paper is to perform an in-depth analysis of the differences and similarities between the distributions of Mendeley readership and citations across fields.

The authors analyze two issues by using in each case a common analytical framework for both metrics: the shape of the distributions of readership and citations, and the field normalization problem generated by differences in citation and readership practices across fields. In the first issue the authors use the characteristic scores and scales method, and in the second the measurement framework introduced in Crespo et al. (2013).

There are three main results. First, the citations and Mendeley readership distributions exhibit a strikingly similar degree of skewness in all fields. Second, the results on “exchange rates (ERs)” for Mendeley readership empirically supports the possibility of comparing readership counts across fields, as well as the field normalization of readership distributions using ERs as normalization factors. Third, field normalization using field mean readerships as normalization factors leads to comparably good results.

These findings open up challenging new questions, particularly regarding the possibility of obtaining conflicting results from field normalized citation and Mendeley readership indicators; this suggests the need for better determining the role of the two metrics in capturing scientific recognition.

Altmetric indicators have been proposed as a complement to citation counts in research evaluation. Conceivably, they might also be used to supplement other methods for estimating journal readership. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of Mendeley reference management software to characterize the features of the readership of library and information science (LIS) literature.

The authors used the Social Sciences Citation Index to retrieve 54,655 articles and reviews published between 1995 and 2014 and indexed in the category “Information Science & Library Science”. Each record was then searched in Mendeley to obtain the number of bookmarks of the paper and the academic status of the users.

Mendeley covers 61 per cent of the LIS literature published in the last 20 years. In all, 75 per cent of the papers published in the last five years had been bookmarked at least once in Mendeley whereas just 55 per cent had been cited in Web of Science. Reviews are bookmarked more frequently than articles, and papers in English have more bookmarks than papers in any other language. Most users of LIS literature are PhD and postgraduate students.

The study shows that altmetrics can be used as a source of data in information behaviour studies. Reference management software provides an unobtrusive means of capturing reading habits in the scholarly literature. Compared to citation counts, bookmarks are rapidly available and also reflect usage outside the academic community.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the journal impact factor (IF) is not able to reflect the full impact of scholarly journals and provides an overview of alternative and complementary methods in journal evaluation.

Aslib Proceedings (AP) is exemplarily analyzed with a set of indicators from five dimensions of journal evaluation, i.e. journal output, content, perception and usage, citations and management to accurately reflect its various strengths and weaknesses beyond the IF.

AP has become more international in terms of authors and more diverse regarding its topics. Citation impact is generally low and, with the exception of a special issue on blogs, remains world average. However, an evaluation of downloads and Mendeley readers reveals that the journal is an important source of information for professionals and students and certain topics are frequently read but not cited.

The study is limited to one journal.

An overview of various indicators and methods is provided that can be applied in the quantitative evaluation of scholarly journals (and also to articles, authors and institutions).

After a publication history of more than 60 years, this analysis takes stock of AP, highlighting strengths and weaknesses and developments over time. The case study provides an example and overview of the possibilities of multidimensional journal evaluation.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the understanding of how the potential of altmetrics varies around the world by measuring the percentage of articles with non-zero metrics (coverage) for articles published from a developing region (Latin America).

This study uses article metadata from a prominent Latin American journal portal, SciELO, and combines it with altmetrics data from Altmetric.com and with data collected by author-written scripts. The study is primarily descriptive, focusing on coverage levels disaggregated by year, country, subject area, and language.

Coverage levels for most of the social media sources studied was zero or negligible. Only three metrics had coverage levels above 2 per cent – Mendeley, Twitter, and Facebook. Of these, Twitter showed the most significant differences with previous studies. Mendeley coverage levels reach those found by previous studies, but it takes up to two years longer for articles to be saved in the reference manager. For the most recent year, coverage was less than half than what was found in previous studies. The coverage levels of Facebook appear similar (around 3 per cent) to that of previous studies.

The Altmetric.com data used for some of the analyses were collected for a six month period. For other analyses, Altmetric.com data were only available for a single country (Brazil).

The results of this study have implications for the altmetrics research community and for any stakeholders interested in using altmetrics for evaluation. It suggests the need of careful sample selection when wishing to make generalizable claims about altmetrics.