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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.

It is widely recognized that sharing data is beneficial not only for science but also for the common good, and researchers are increasingly expected to share their data. However, many researchers are still not making their data available, one of the reasons being that this activity is not adequately recognized in the current reward system of science. Since the attribution of data sets to individual researchers is necessary if we are to include them in research evaluation processes, the purpose of this paper is to explore the feasibility of linking data set records from DataCite to the authors of articles indexed in the Web of Science.

DataCite and WoS records are linked together based on the similarity between the names of the data sets’ creators and the articles’ authors, as well as the similarity between the noun phrases in the titles of the data sets and the titles and abstract of the articles.

The authors report that a large number of DataCite records can be attributed to specific authors in WoS, and the authors demonstrate that the prevalence of data sharing varies greatly depending on the research discipline.

It is yet unclear how data sharing can provide adequate recognition for individual researchers. Bibliometric indicators are commonly used for research evaluation, but to date no large-scale assessment of individual researchers’ data sharing activities has been carried out.

This chapter analyzes the tourism industry from national and regional perspectives, in order to understand the past and current trends in Costa Rica’s positioning and branding attributes and strategies for tourism development. The intent here is not to provide an exhaustive comprehensive literature review of academic research on country branding; and so it is by all means a case study as it describes the evolution of the tourism industry in Costa Rica – including the transformative stages the country went through since the 1980s – as planned tourism national management programs evolved toward reaching the target of creating a nature-based tourism brand. The medical industry and then medical tourism industries are analyzed in a global basis and the US market is examined in detail because of its potential to develop a new complementary niche for Costa Rica’s tourism industry. The chapter intends to asses Costa Rica’s potential to become a country brand in medical tourism, leveraged on its natural tourism destination branding status quo.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

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.

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.

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.

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.