Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature

Abstract

Social media has become integrated into the fabric of the scholarly communication system in fundamental ways: principally through scholarly use of social media platforms and the promotion of new indicators on the basis of interactions with these platforms. Research and scholarship in this area has accelerated since the coining and subsequent advocacy for altmetrics-that is, research indicators based on social media activity. This review provides an extensive account of the state-of-the art in both scholarly use of social media and altmetrics. The review consists of two main parts: the first examines the use of social media in academia, examining the various functions these platforms have in the scholarly communication process and the factors that affect this use. The second part reviews empirical studies of altmetrics, discussing the various interpretations of altmetrics, data collection and methodological limitations, and differences according to platform. The review ends with a critical discussion of the implications of this transformation in the scholarly communication system.

What Can Altmetric.com Tell Us About Policy Citations of Research? An Analysis of Altmetric.com Data for Research Articles from the University of Sheffield

“…Much of the data Altmetric.com trawl through comes from social media, which is not exclusive to the research community. Yet, at present there is evidence to suggest that rather than build a bridge between the research community and society at large, social media has instead helped open new channels for informal discussions among researchers (Sugimoto et al, 2016).…”

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

“…Since the introduction of the term altmetrics to the Scientometrics community, scholars have been exploring the possible analytics that this online activity can offer and the impact it may have on the diverse communities within and outside the academic community including clinicians, practitioners, and the general public (see Sugimoto et al (2017) for an extended review of altmetrics literature).…”

¿Las correlaciones altmétricas/métricas tradicionales se ven afectadas por los planes de marketing en medios sociales de las revistas? El caso de la revista Comunicar

“…En la correlación con citas recibidas, tan solo destaca Mendeley (Martín-Martín et al, 2016), así como en la cobertura de la producción científica indizada (Sugimoto et al, 2017;Robinson-García et al, 2014, p. 363;Suiter y Moulaison, 2015), convirtiéndose junto a Twitter (Hassan;Gillani, 2016), en prometedoras fuentes de datos sociales para las altmétricas.…”

“…El debate gira en torno a qué miden exactamente estos datos y cómo aplicarlos a la evaluación científica (Sugimoto et al, 2017). El consenso llega por su carácter complementario a las métricas tradicionales (Torres-Salinas, Cabezas-Clavijo y Jiménez-Contreras, 2013; Costas, Zahedi y Wouters, 2015a), pues ayudan a completar el alcance de la investigación más allá de los canales tradicionales y ofrecen «indicadores de impacto rápidos y en tiempo real, públicamente accesibles y transparentes, incluyen una amplia audiencia no académica y cubren una mayor diversidad de productos y fuentes de investigación» (Erdt et al, 2016).…”