Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services
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TLDR
Comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles.Abstract:
Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have reported medium correlations between specific altmetrics and citation rates for individual journals or fields. To fill this gap, this study compares 11 altmetrics with Web of Science citations for 76 to 208,739 PubMed articles with at least one altmetric mention in each case and up to 1,891 journals per metric. It also introduces a simple sign test to overcome biases caused by different citation and usage windows. Statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and higher citations for articles with positive altmetric scores in all cases with sufficient evidence (Twitter, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blogs, mainstream media and forums) except perhaps for Google+ posts. Evidence was insufficient for LinkedIn, Pinterest, question and answer sites, and Reddit, and no conclusions should be drawn about articles with zero altmetric scores or the strength of any correlation between altmetrics and citations. Nevertheless, comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles. Finally, the coverage of all the altmetrics except for Twitter seems to be low and so it is not clear if they are prevalent enough to be useful in practice.read more
Citations
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Science Mapping: A Systematic Review of the Literature
TL;DR: A systematic review of the literature concerning major aspects of science mapping is presented to demonstrate the use of a science mapping approach to perform the review so that researchers may apply the procedure to the review of a scientific domain of their own interest.
Journal ArticleDOI
Do altmetrics correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective
TL;DR: In this paper, 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.
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How well developed are altmetrics? A cross-disciplinary analysis of the presence of `alternative metrics' in scientific publications
TL;DR: The main result of the study is that the altmetrics source that provides the most metrics is Mendeley, with metrics on readerships for 62.6 % of all the publications studied, other sources only provide marginal information.
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Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature
TL;DR: This review provides an extensive account of the state of the art in both scholarly use of social media and altmetrics, reviewing the various functions these platforms have in the scholarly communication process and the factors that affect this use.
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Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature
Stefanie Haustein,Isabella Peters,Cassidy R. Sugimoto,Mike Thelwall,Vincent Larivière,Vincent Larivière +5 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a systematic evidence about how often Twitter is used to disseminate information about journal articles in the biomedical sciences is provided, based on 1.4 million documents covered by both PubMed and Web of Science and published between 2010 and 2012.
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