Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community

Abstract

Altmetrics, indices based on social media platforms and tools, have recently emerged as alternative means of measuring scholarly impact. Such indices assume that scholars in fact populate online social environments, and interact with scholarly products in the social web. We tested this assumption by examining the use and coverage of social media environments amongst a sample of bibliometricians examining both their own use of online platforms and the use of their papers on social reference managers. As expected, coverage varied: 82% of articles published by sampled bibliometricians were included in Mendeley libraries, while only 28% were included in CiteULike. Mendeley bookmarking was moderately correlated (.45) with Scopus citation counts. We conducted a survey among the participants of the STI2012 participants. Over half of respondents asserted that social media tools were affecting their professional lives, although uptake of online tools varied widely. 68% of those surveyed had LinkedIn accounts, while Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate each claimed a fifth of respondents. Nearly half of those responding had Twitter accounts, which they used both personally and professionally. Surveyed bibliometricians had mixed opinions on altmetrics' potential; 72% valued download counts, while a third saw potential in tracking articles' influence in blogs, Wikipedia, reference managers, and social media. Altogether, these findings suggest that some online tools are seeing substantial use by bibliometricians, and that they present a potentially valuable source of impact data.

New ways of building, showcasing, and measuring scholarly reputation

“…There have been previous studies [5][6][7][8] but they largely focus on membership, popularity, and general use of individual platforms and confirmed that LinkedIn was the most popular platform among scholars (not a surprise given its wide professional reach and enormous membership of over 350 million). Between 25% and 68% of academics surveyed had LinkedIn profiles.…”

Análisis bibliométrico de la producción científica, indizada en MEDLINE, sobre los servicios de salud proporcionados por las unidades de hospitalización a domicilio

“…No obstante, se observó un significativo aumento en la época más actual. En todo caso, hay que intentar mejorar los valores obtenidos, debido a que estas herramientas en línea tienen un gran potencial sobre el impacto de los datos de la investigación y pueden funcionar como complemento de otro tipo de indicadores (17,18).…”

Supporting the research feedback loop

“…Within academic libraries there are specialists who focus on bibliometrics and whose job is to explore and analyse publication and citation patterns for their institution. Altmetrics have been explored in varying degrees by the bibliometric community for some time (Haustein, Peters, Bar-Ilan, et al, 2013). Institutional altmetric dashboards as offered by the likes of Altmetric.com provide internal research intelligence with dissemination of this data usually overseen by the academic library or research office.…”