Tweets vs. Mendeley readers: How do these two
            social media metrics differ?

Haustein, Stefanie; Larivière, Vincent; Thelwall, Mike; Amyot, Didier; Peters, Isabella

doi:10.1515/itit-2014-1048

Cited by 130 publications

(129 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Of the various alternative indicators (altmetrics) that have been proposed, Mendeley reader counts are the most promising for early impact evidence because of their relatively high correlations with citation counts and early appearance (Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2014). Although tweets may appear sooner, they are much less reliable for impact indicators (Haustein, Larivière, Thelwall, Amyot, & Peters, 2014;Thelwall, Haustein, Larivière, & Sugimoto, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Mendeley reader counts high enough for research evaluations when articles are published?

Thelwall

2017

AJIM

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Design/methodology/approach -Average Mendeley reader counts were compared to average Scopus citation counts for 104520 articles from ten disciplines during the second half of 2016. Findings -Articles attracted, on average, between 0.1 and 0.8 Mendeley readers per article in the month in which they first appeared in Scopus. This is about ten times more than the average Scopus citation count. Research limitations/implications -Other subjects may use Mendeley more or less than the ten investigated here. The results are dependent on Scopus's indexing practices, and Mendeley reader counts can be manipulated and have national and seniority biases. Practical implications -Mendeley reader counts during the month of publication are more powerful than Scopus citations for comparing the average impacts of groups of documents but are not high enough to differentiate between the impacts of typical individual articles. Originality/value -This is the first multi-disciplinary and systematic analysis of Mendeley reader counts from the publication month of an article. IntroductionAcademic research is evaluated for appointment, promotion, tenure, for university league tables, for national research evaluation exercises and for self-reflection purposes. Some of these use quantitative data or are supported by numerical evidence of impact. Citation counts to refereed journal articles are a common source of this quantitative data, including in the form of Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) and field normalised citation counts (Garfield, 2006;Waltman, van Eck, van Leeuwen, Visser, & van Raan, 2011;Wilsdon, et al., 2015). Citation counts are not suitable for helping to evaluate new research because articles may take three years to attract a substantial number of citations due to publication delays. For this reason, formal evaluations often use a citation window of considerable length, such as three years (Wang, 2013), which excludes newer articles from evaluations. This means that the most recent and, therefore, most relevant research cannot be evaluated with the help of most citation-based indicators because they cannot differentiate effectively between different levels of impact for individual articles.Two solutions to this problem are to use publishing journal JIFs (or journal rankings: Kulczycki, 2017) as a proxy for citation impact or to use web-based early impact indicators. JIFs can avoid citing article publication delays if it is accepted that the average impact of a journal is an appropriate proxy for the impact of its articles (but see: Lozano, Larivière, & Gingras, 2012; and note also the time dimension: Larivière, Archambault, & Gingras, 2008) 1 Thelwall, M. (in press). Are Mendeley reader counts high enough for research evaluations when articles are published? Aslib Journal of Information Management, 69(2).

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Mendeley reader counts high enough for research evaluations when articles are published?

Thelwall

2017

AJIM

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“…Many studies have shown that counts of Mendeley readers correlate with citation counts for individual journal articles within a field, whichever field is analysed (Bar-Ilan, 2012;Haustein, Larivière, Thelwall, Amyot, & Peters, 2014;Li, Thelwall, & Giustini, 2012;Thelwall, & Wilson, in press;Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2014). Mendeley users tend to be younger than average and include a small proportion of master's and bachelor's degree students (less than 20% -perhaps much less due to ambiguity in Mendeley's user category names) that presumably do not publish, as well as professional users such as medical doctors and librarians (Mohammadi, Thelwall, Haustein, & Larivière, in press).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why do papers have many Mendeley readers but few Scopus-indexed citations and vice versa?

Thelwall

2015

Journal of Librarianship and Information Science

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Counts of citations to academic articles are widely used as indicators of their scholarly impact. In addition, alternative indicators derived from social websites have been proposed to cover some of the shortcomings of citation counts. The most promising such indicator is counts of readers of an article in the social reference sharing site Mendeley. Although Mendeley reader counts tend to correlate strongly and positively with citation counts within scientific fields, an understanding of causes of citation-reader anomalies is needed before Mendeley reader counts can be used with confidence as indicators. In response, this article proposes a list reasons for anomalies based upon an analysis of articles that are highly cited but have few Mendeley readers, or vice versa. The results show that there are both technical and legitimate reasons for differences, with the latter including communities that use research but do not cite it in Scopus-indexed publications or do not use Mendeley. The results also suggest that the lower of the two values (citation counts, reader counts) tends to underestimate of the impact of an article and so taking the maximum is a reasonable strategy for a combined impact indicator.

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“…Social media, especially Twitter, is increasingly used as a way of demonstrating impact in biomedicine. Haustein (21) reported that 20 % articles indexed in PubMed in 2012 received at last one tweet. This finding raises the question as to whether an OA paper which scores high on altmetrics tools actually gets much higher download and citation rates compared to a paper with a low altmetrics score.…”

Section: Debates and Controversies About The Impact Of Open Accessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of open access on the medical literature: a review of current literature

Turk¹

2017

SlovMedJour

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IzvlečekIzhodišča: Namen članka je podati pregled vpliva odprtega dostopa na znanstvene objave v medicini glede na tri kategorije: citiranost, vidnost in omembe v socialnih medijih.Metode: Podatke smo pridobili z iskalno strategijo, ki je vsebovala ključne besede, kot so "open access", "citation impact", "citation advantage", "citations count", "article download", "article usage", "social media attention" in "altmetrics".Rezultati: Z iskalno strategijo, ki smo jo uporabili v treh zbirkah podatkov, smo pridobili stosedem člankov, primernih za analizo. V sedeminšestdesetih člankih izmed teh se uporablja enostavna metodologija štetja citatov odprtodostopnih člankov in člankov iz naročniških revij, v devetnajst člankih se primerja število citatov in vpogledov, v enaindvajsetih člankih se raziskujejo omembe v socialnih medijih. Od tega je petindvajset člankov medicinskih, v katerih se obravnava vpliv vseh navedenih kategorij.Zaključki: V sedeminšestdesetih člankih izmed teh se uporablja enostavna metodologija štetja citatov odprtodostopnih člankov in člankov iz naročniških revij, v devetnajst člankih se primerja število citatov in vpogledov, v enaindvajsetih člankih se raziskujejo omembe v socialnih medijih. Od tega je petindvajset člankov medicinskih, v katerih se obravnava vpliv vseh navedenih kategorij. AbstractBackground: The aim of the article is to conduct an overview of the impact of OA on the medical articles based on 3-part categorization.Methods: Data were identified by a search strategy with eight combinations of keywords (open access, citation impact, citation advantage, citation count, article download, article usage, social media attention, altmetrics) and searched in three different databases. Results:The analysis was conducted on 107 studies dealing with citations, downloads and social impact. Sixty-seven of them simply employed the counting citations to OA and non-OA articles; nineteen articles compared the downloads and citations counts; and twenty-one articles investigated the social impact of OA articles. Twenty-five articles investigated the citations, download counts, and social impact of medical articles. Conclusions:The studies investigating the citation impact mostly showed citation advantages. Those that employed citation and download counts of medical articles using randomized controlled trials showed that OA articles were downloaded significantly more frequently, but found no evidence

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Tweets vs. Mendeley readers: How do these two social media metrics differ?

Cited by 130 publications

References 17 publications

Are Mendeley reader counts high enough for research evaluations when articles are published?

Are Mendeley reader counts high enough for research evaluations when articles are published?

Why do papers have many Mendeley readers but few Scopus-indexed citations and vice versa?

The impact of open access on the medical literature: a review of current literature

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