Maflahi, N. & Thelwall, M. (2016). When are readership counts as useful as citation counts? Scopus versus Mendeley for LIS journals. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67(1), 191-199. [Based upon four key LIS journals, Mendeley reader counts are reasonable proxies for citation counts for articles that are 1-10 years old.]In theory, articles can attract readers on the social reference sharing site Mendeley before they can attract citations, so Mendeley altmetrics could provide early indications of article impact. This article investigates the influence of time on the number of Mendeley readers of an article through a theoretical discussion and an investigation into the relationship between counts of readers of, and citations to, 4 general library and information science (LIS) journals. For this discipline, it takes about 7 years for articles to attract as many Scopus citations as Mendeley readers, and after this the Spearman correlation between readers and citers is stable at about 0.6 for all years. This suggests that Mendeley readership counts may be useful impact indicators for both newer and older articles. The lack of dates for individual Mendeley article readers and an unknown bias toward more recent articles mean that readership data should be normalized individually by year, however, before making any comparisons between articles published in different years

International collaboration tends to result in more highly cited research, and, partly as a result of this, many research funding schemes are specifically international in scope. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether this citation advantage is the result of higher quality research or is due to other factors, such as a larger audience for the publications. To test whether the apparent advantage of internationally collaborative research may be due to additional interest in articles from the countries of the authors, this article assesses the extent to which the national affiliations of the authors of articles affect the national affiliations of their Mendeley readers. Based upon Englishlanguage Web of Science articles in ten fields from science, medicine, social science, and the humanities, the results of statistical models comparing author and reader affiliations suggest that, in most fields, Mendeley users are disproportionately readers of articles authored from within their own country. In addition, there are several cases where Mendeley users from certain countries tend to ignore articles from specific other countries, although it is not clear whether this reflects national biases or different national specialisms within a field. In conclusion, research funders should not incentivise international collaboration on the basis that it is, in general, higher quality because its higher impact may be primarily due to its larger audience. Moreover, authors should guard against national biases in their reading in order to select only the best and most relevant publications to inform their research.

Within science, citation counts are widely used to estimate research impact but publication delays mean that they are not useful for recent research. This gap can be filled by Mendeley reader counts, which are valuable early impact indicators for academic articles because they appear before citations and correlate strongly with them. Nevertheless, it is not known how Mendeley readership counts accumulate within the year of publication, and so it is unclear how soon they can be used. In response, this paper reports a longitudinal weekly study of the Mendeley readers of articles in 6 library and information science journals from 2016. The results suggest that Mendeley readers accrue from when articles are first available online and continue to steadily build. For journals with large publication delays, articles can already have substantial numbers of readers by their publication date. Thus, Mendeley reader counts may even be useful as early impact indicators for articles before they have been officially published in a journal issue. If field normalized indicators are needed, then these can be generated when journal issues are published using the online first date.

This article introduces a new source of evidence of the value of medical-related research: citations from clinical guidelines. These give evidence that research findings have been used to inform the day-to-day practice of medical staff. To identify whether citations from guidelines can give different information from that of traditional citation counts, this article assesses the extent to which references in clinical guidelines tend to be highly cited in the academic literature and highly read in Mendeley. Using evidence from the United Kingdom, references associated with the UK's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines tended to be substantially more cited than comparable articles, unless they had been published in the most recent 3 years. Citation counts also seemed to be stronger indicators than Mendeley readership altmetrics. Hence, although presence in guidelines may be particularly useful to highlight the contributions of recently published articles, for older articles citation counts may already be sufficient to recognize their contributions to health in society

Research collaboration is promoted by governments and research funders but if the relative prevalence and merits of collaboration vary internationally different national and disciplinary strategies may be needed to promote it. This study compares the team size and field normalised citation impact of research across all 27 Scopus broad fields in the ten countries with the most journal articles indexed in Scopus 2008-2012. The results show that team size varies substantially by discipline and country, with Japan (4.2) having two thirds more authors per article than the UK (2.5). Solo authorship is rare in China (4%) but common in the UK (27%). Whilst increasing team size associates with higher citation impact in almost all countries and fields, this association is much weaker in China than elsewhere. There are also field differences in the association between citation impact and collaboration. For example, larger team sizes in the Business, Management & Accounting category do not seem to associate with greater research impact, and for China and India, solo authorship associates with higher citation impact. Overall, there are substantial international and field differences in the extent to which researchers collaborate and the extent to which collaboration associates with higher citation impact.