Mendeley readership as a filtering tool to identify highly cited publications

Abstract

This study presents a large scale analysis of the distribution and presence of Mendeley readership scores over time and across disciplines. We study whether Mendeley readership scores (RS) can identify highly cited publications more effectively than journal citation scores (JCS). Web of Science (WoS) publications with DOIs published during the period 2004-2013 and across 5 major scientific fields have been analyzed. The main result of this study shows that readership scores are more effective (in terms of precision/recall values) than journal citation scores to identify highly cited publications across all fields of science and publication years. The findings also show that 86.5% of all the publications are covered by Mendeley and have at least one reader. Also the share of publications with Mendeley readership scores is increasing from 84% in 2004 to 89% in 2009, and decreasing from 88% in 2010 to 82% in 2013. However, it is noted that publications from 2010 onwards exhibit on average a higher density of readership vs. citation scores. This indicates that compared to citation scores, readership scores are more prevalent for recent publications and hence they could work as an early indicator of research impact. These findings highlight the potential and value of Mendeley as a tool for scientometric purposes and particularly as a relevant tool to identify highly cited publications.

Social Media Attention Increases Article Visits: An Investigation on Article-Level Referral Data of PeerJ

“…To be confirmed in this research Mendeley readership and times cited (Priem et al, 2012;Zahedi et al, 2017). Nevertheless, the results of correlations between tweets and citation are controversy.…”

Zenodo in the Spotlight of Traditional and New Metrics

“…These are mostly captures traced in Mendeley, a phenomenon that is generally applicable to all data record types. This corroborates earlier research, which found that Mendeley is one of the altmetrics data sources with the highest coverage (e.g., Zahedi et al, 2017).…”

Are Mendeley reader counts useful impact indicators in all fields?

“…Compared to a similar broad prior study (Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2017), the ratio of Mendeley readers to Scopus citations is about the same overall for publications from 2012: it is higher for newer articles (2013) and lower for older articles (2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011). The ratio of Mendeley readers to Scopus citations varied by disciplinary area with relatively few readers in Biomedical and Health Sciences and Natural Sciences and Engineering, and relatively many in social sciences and humanities (Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2017).…”

“…Researchers may add an article to their Mendeley library at the time that they read it or even beforehand (Mohammadi, Thelwall, & Kousha, 2016), which largely removes the publication lag (Maflahi & Thelwall, 2016, in press;Thelwall & Sud, 2016;Thelwall, 2017a). Mendeley reader counts are suitable substitutes for citation counts because they correlate highly with them in many fields (Haustein, Larivière, Thelwall, Amyot, & Peters, 2014;Mohammadi, & Thelwall, 2014;Thelwall & Wilson, 2016;Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2014;Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2017), suggesting that they also indicate both scholarly influence and peer quality judgements. The latter has also been demonstrated directly (HEFCE, 2015).…”

“…The above evidence of disciplinary differences in the relationship between citation counts and Mendeley reader counts does not give a recipe to work out the merits of Mendeley for any individual field because they have all either used broad categories (e.g., five comprehensive categories in: Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2017) or sampled narrower categories (e.g., 14 broad categories of articles with PubMed IDs and 119 NSF specialities within this set: Haustein, Larivière, Thelwall, Amyot, & Peters, 2014). To fill this gap, the current article assesses the relationship between Mendeley readers and Scopus citations with a comprehensive set of narrow field categories.…”