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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 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 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 paper is to study the presence of highly cited papers of Nature in social media websites and tools. It also tries to examine the correlation between altmetric and bibliometric indicators.

This descriptive study was carried out using altmetric indicators. The research sample consisted of 1,000 most-cited articles in Nature. In February 2019, the bibliographic information of these articles was extracted from the Scopus database. Then, the titles of all articles were manually searched on Google, and by referring to the article in the journal website and altmetric institution, the data related to social media presence and altmetric score of articles were collected. The data were analyzed using Microsoft Excel and SPSS.

According to the results of the study, from 1,000 articles, 989 of them (98.9 per cent) were mentioned at least once in different social media websites and tools. The most used altmetric source in highly cited articles was Mendeley (98.9 per cent), followed by Citeulike (79.8 per cent) and Wikipedia (69.4 per cent). Most Tweets, blog posts, Facebook posts, news stories, readers in Mendeley, Citeulike and Connotea and Wikipedia citations belonged to the article titled “Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search”. The highest altmetric score was 3,135 which belonged to this paper. Most tweeters and articles’ readers were from the USA. The membership type of the tweeters was public membership. In terms of fields of study, most readers were PhD students in Agricultural and Biological Sciences. Finally, the results of Spearman’s Correlation revealed positive significant statistical correlation between all altmetric indicators and received citations of highly cited articles (p-value = 0.0001).

The results of this study can help researchers, editors and editorial boards of journals better understand the importance and benefits of using social media and tools to publish articles.

Altmetrics is a relatively new field, and in particular, there are not many studies related to the presence of articles in various social media until now. Accordingly, in this study, a comprehensive altmetric analysis was carried out on 1000 most-cited articles of one of the world's most reliable journals.

Social interaction applications and reference tools are actively used by researchers to share and manage their research publications. Thus, this paper aims to determine the scholarly impact of selected Indian central universities.

This study analyzed 669 articles having both Dimensions citations and Altmetric attention scores published by 35 Indian central universities for 4 subfields of Computer Science using Altmetric Explorer. This paper determined each university’s contribution in the studied subfields of Computer Science and the correlation among Altmetric attention score (aggregated and individual), Dimensions citation, and Mendeley readership counts for all 669 articles and stratified percentile sets of top 25%, and top 50% of the overall number of articles.

The findings showed that Jawaharlal Nehru University had the maximum Altmetric attention score, Banaras Hindu University received the maximum Dimensions citation, and University of Hyderabad (UoH) received the maximum number of Mendeley readers. Each central university was examined individually and then ranked based on their median values of Dimensions citations and Altmetric attention scores. Further, Twitter had the maximum Altmetric coverage, followed by Google+, Patent and Facebook for the retrieved articles. A significant strong positive correlation was observed between the Dimensions citation and Mendeley readership counts for all the three categories.

Both Altmetric attention scores and Dimensions citations can help funding agencies to assess and evaluate the research productivity of these universities, thus, making important decisions such as increasing, decreasing, re-distributing their funds.

The current body of research is focused mostly on relationships between citations and individual Altmetric indicators predominantly. For most of the studies, the citations were retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science or Google Scholar database. It was observed that by far, no study had examined the relationship between citations retrieved from Dimensions database, Altmetrics scores (both aggregated and individual) and Mendeley readership counts.

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 purpose of this paper is to provide insights on the improvement of academic impact and social attention of Chinese collaboration articles from the perspective of altmetrics.

The authors retrieved articles which are from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and indexed by Nature Index as sampled articles. With the methods of distribution analysis, comparative analysis and correlation analysis, authors compare the coverage differences of altmetric sources for CAS Chinese articles and CAS international articles, and analyze the correlation between the collaborative information and the altmetric indicators.

Results show that the coverage of altmetric sources for CAS international articles is greater than that for CAS Chinese articles. Mendeley and Twitter cover a higher percentage of collaborative articles than other sources studied. Collaborative information, such as number of collaborating countries, number of collaborating institutions, and number of collaborating authors, show moderate or low correlation with altmetric indicator counts. Mendeley readership has a moderate correlation with altmetric indicators like tweets, news outlets and blog posts.

International scientific collaboration at different levels improves attention, academic impact and social impact of articles. International collaboration and altmetrics indicators supplement each other. The results of this study can help us better understand the relationship between altmetrics indicators of articles and collaborative information of articles. It is of great significance to evaluate the influence of Chinese articles, as well as help to improve the academic impact and social attention of Chinese collaboration articles.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, few studies focus on the use of altmetrics to assess publications produced through Chinese academic collaboration. This study is one of a few attempts that include the number of collaborating countries, number of collaborating institutions, and number of collaborating authors of scientific collaboration into the discussion of altmetric indicators and figured out the relationship among them.

This paper aims to assess the impact of research in the field of scientometrics by using the altmetrics (social media metrics) approach.

This is an applied study which uses scientometric and altmetrics methods. The research population consists of the studies and their citations published in the two core journals (Scientometrics and Journal of Informetrics) in a period of five years (included 1,738 papers and 11,504 citations). Collecting and extracting the studies directly was carried from Springer and ScienceDirect databases. The Altmetric Explorer, a service provided by Altmetric.com, was used to collect data on studies from various sources (www.altmetric.com/). The research studies with the altmetric scores were identified (included 830 papers). The altmetric scores represent the quantity and quality of attention that the study has received on social media. The association between altmetric scores and citation indicators was investigated by using correlation tests.

The findings indicated a significant, positive and weak statistical relationship between the number of citations of the studies published in the field of scientometrics and the altmetric scores of these studies, as well as the number of readers of these studies in the two social networks (Mendeley and Citeulike) with the number of their citations. In this study, there was no statistically significant relationship between the number of citations of the studies and the number of readers on Twitter. In sum, the above findings suggest that some social networks and their indices can be representations of the impact of scientific papers, similar citations. However, owing to the weakness of the correlation coefficients, the replacement of these two categories of indicators is not recommended, but it is possible to use the altmetrics indicators as complementary scientometrics indicators in evaluating the impact of research.

Investigating the impact of research on social media can reflect the social impact of research and can also be useful for libraries, universities, and research organizations in planning, budgeting, and resource allocation processes.

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.