On the differences between citations and altmetrics: An investigation of factors driving altmetrics versus citations for finnish articles

Abstract

This study examines a range of factors associated with future citation and altmetric counts to a paper. The factors include journal impact factor, individual collaboration, international collaboration, institution prestige, country prestige, research funding, abstract readability, abstract length, title length, number of cited references, field size, and field type and will be modeled in association with citation counts, Mendeley readers, Twitter posts, Facebook posts, blog posts, and news posts. The results demonstrate that eight factors are important for increased citation counts, seven different factors are important for increased Mendeley readers, eight factors are important for increased Twitter posts, three factors are important for increased Facebook posts, six factors are important for increased blog posts, and five factors are important for increased news posts. Journal impact factor and international collaboration are the two factors that significantly associate with increased citation counts and with all altmetric scores. Moreover, it seems that the factors driving Mendeley readership are similar to those driving citation counts. However, the altmetric events differ from each other in terms of a small number of factors; for instance, institution prestige and country prestige associate with increased Mendeley readers and blog and news posts, but it is an insignificant factor for Twitter and Facebook posts. The findings contribute to the continued development of theoretical models and methodological developments associated with capturing, interpreting, and understanding altmetric events.

Measuring social media activity of scientific literature: an exhaustive comparison of scopus and novel altmetrics big data

“…This study is similar to the works of Didegah et al (2017), Costas et al (2015) and Haustein et al (2014a), which was undertaken using WoS data and a combination of WoS data and PubMed data, respectively. This work complements their findings by examining scientific literature retrieved from the Scopus database.…”

The effect of bioRxiv preprints on citations and altmetrics

“…In a second step we therefore conducted regression analysis to determine the effect of bioRxiv deposition on citations and altmetrics when controlling for multiple explanatory variables (summarised in Table 1). These explanatory variables are not exhaustive, as citations and altmetrics can be influenced by a number of additional variables which we do not account for (Tahamtan et al, 2016; Didegah et al, 2018), and do not take into account certain immeasurable characteristics of an article such as its underlying quality or the quality of the authors themselves. Thus, we refrain from claiming a definitive causative relationship between bioRxiv deposition and a citation or altmetric advantage.…”

“…Gender is found to have no significant effect on tweets, blog posts and Wikipedia mentions, but the gender of the first author is a positive predictor of news mention (articles with a female first author receive 27 % more mentions in mainstream media), whilst the gender of the first and last author negatively predict Mendeley reads. These are just a few examples of factors which show that individual altmetric indicators represent activity of different online communities (a full investigation of which is outside the scope of this study; see Haustein et al (2015) and Didegah et al (2018) for further discussion) and should thus be considered in isolation (instead of, e.g., aggregated Altmetric.com scores) in future studies attempting to understand the relationship between altmetrics and preprint deposition behaviour.…”

External Tests of Peer Review Validity Via Impact Measures

“…In addition, blogs, conference presentations and other alternate publications may be the only route to announce negative results, which may be unpublishable in traditional journals but are still useful and important products of the research. Although one study suggests funded research is viewed online more often than unfunded research (Didegah et al, 2017), and another has examined the relation between views, Twitter counts and post-publication peer review results of manuscripts (Bornmann, 2017), there are currently no studies in the literature directly looking at funding decisions and altmetrics (Dinsmore et al, 2014). …”