Altmetrics promise useful support for assessing the impact of scientific works, including beyond the scholarly community and with very limited citation windows. Unfortunately, altmetrics scores are currently available only for recent articles and cannot be used as covariates in predicting long term impact of publications. However, the study of their statistical properties is a subject of evident interest to scientometricians. Applying the same approaches used in the literature to assess the universality of citation distributions, the intention here is to test whether the universal distribution also holds for Mendeley readerships. Results of the analysis carried out on a sample of publications randomly extracted from the Web of Science confirm that readerships seem to share similar shapes across fields and can be rescaled to a common and universal form. Such rescaling results as not particularly effective on the right tails. In other regions, rescaling causes a good collapse of field specific distributions, even for very recent publications.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.