Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective

Abstract

An extensive analysis of the presence of different altmetric indicators provided by Altmetric.com across scientific fields is presented, particularly focusing on their relationship with citations. Our results confirm that the presence and density of social media altmetric counts are still very low and not very frequent among scientific publications, with 15%-24% of the publications presenting some altmetric activity and concentrated on the most recent publications, although their presence is increasing over time. Publications from the social sciences, humanities, and the medical and life sciences show the highest presence of altmetrics, indicating their potential value and interest for these fields. The analysis of the relationships between altmetrics and citations confirms previous claims of positive correlations but is relatively weak, thus supporting the idea that altmetrics do not reflect the same kind of impact as citations. Also, altmetric counts do not always present a better filtering of highly-cited publications than journal citation scores. Altmetric scores (particularly mentions in blogs) are able to identify highly-cited publications with higher levels of precision than journal citation scores (JCS), but they have a lower level of recall. The value of altmetrics as a complementary tool of citation analysis is highlighted, although more research is suggested to disentangle the potential meaning and value of altmetric indicators for research evaluation.

Can alternative indicators overcome language biases in citation counts? A comparison of Spanish and UK research

“…Previous studies have found lower Twitter coverage: 21% of about a million WoS journal articles published in 2012 (Haustein et al 2015), 20% of PubMed/WoS articles published in 2012 (Haustein et al 2014) and 13% of over half a million WoS publications published in (Costas et al 2015a) received one or more Twitter mentions. This suggests that more articles are now tweeted or that data collection by Altmetric.com is more comprehensive.…”

“…Twitter seems to have a social orientation (Costas et al 2015b) and more frequency cites scholarly publications than do other altmetric sources, including academic blogs, Facebook and Google+ (Costas et al 2015a;Haustein et al 2015;Thelwall et al 2013). There is also evidence that a considerable number of Twitter mentions occur shortly after research is published (Eysenbach 2011; Priem and Costello 2010) and they seem to reflect attention, popularity or visibility rather than impact, so that Twitter mentions may be an early indicator of the level of attention (including publicity) that articles attract (Haustein et al 2014).…”

“…2 Nevertheless, the alternative indicators also have their own biases and limitations (Bornmann 2014;Holmberg 2015). For instance, the majority of altmetric sources have a low coverage of academic publications and some social media indicators seem to be only valuable for the most recent publications (Costas et al 2015a;Haustein et al 2014). The main drawback of indicators based on social media is perhaps their susceptibility for gaming (Jamali et al 2016;Wouters et al 2015).…”

“…Moreover, altmetrics are less useful in fields with very low altmetric scores, including mathematics, computer science, and natural science and engineering (Costas et al 2015a). All alternative indicators have different properties, however, and need to be analysed individually.…”

Laying the Groundwork for a New Library Service: Scholar-Practitioner & Graduate Student Attitudes Toward Altmetrics and the Curation of Online Profiles

“…Recognizing both the value and the uncertainty of altmetrics, many scholars and librariansincluding the authors of this paper -choose to see traditional informetrics indicators and altmetrics as complementary (Costas, Zahedi, & Wounters, 2015). Rousseau and Yee (2013) suggest that Cronin & Weaver's 1995 term "influmetrics" is a more useful term than altmetrics, while "allmetrics" is used by Plum Analytics, a for-profit scholarly analytics company recently purchased by EBSCO.…”