Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date of this Version
2019
Abstract
Introduction: Altmetrics is one of the novel measures of citation in social media which can be used to investigate scientific and research output. The current study was carried out in order to determine the presence of articles in Altmetrics field in social media, determining superior articles in this field based on Altmetrics criteria and determining the relation between Altmetrics measure and citation performance of these articles.
Method: This is a descriptive study with scientometrics approach using altmetrics method. The study population consisted of 337 articles in the altmetrics field indexed in Scopus database. Among these articles, 53 lacked Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which were eliminated from the study. The citation score of each article was determined by entering each article in Google Scholar database. SPSS16 software was used for data analysis. Descriptive statistics (average and standard deviation) was used to determine the average presence of articles in social media while Pearson correlation coefficient was used to determine the correlation between citation performance of articles and their total altmetrics score.
Findings: Mendeley was the most important social media used by researchers in the field of altmetrics with average score of 45.34 which was followed by Twitter with average score of 19. U-like website with average score of 0.77 and Facebook with average of 0.47 were at the next ranks. The average altmetrics score for articles in the altmetrics field was 20.77 and average citation score was 19.046 and showed that the presence of altmetrics articles in social media and citation databases (Google Scholar) is almost identical.
Conclusion: The results of the current study showed that social media greatly affect the amount of citations to scientific works. Researchers in the field of altmetrics share their articles and research results using social media almost as much as they share them over citation databases. Improving the awareness and educating researchers about social media and their altmetrics scores can improve the sharing of articles and research results in social media.