Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact

By Jason Priem, Heather A. Piwowar, B. Hemminger. arXiv.org, 2012

445 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or "altmetrics", sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science. We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, while close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library. There is, however, an encouraging diversity; a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone. There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact "flavors", capturing impacts of different types on different audiences; for instance, some articles may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.

Subfields: Communication, Ecological Modeling, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/185cb3fe32dd02a69e82780d14d38cea6ad53d78

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Citations in the corpus

Opening science: towards an agenda of open science in academia and industry (2014, background): “Social media already plays a prominent role in the altmetrics discussion, however more empirical evidence is needed (Priem et al. 2012; Piwowar 2013).”
Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services (2013, background): “Priem, Piwowar, and Hemminger [36] examined the distribution of social media events over time for PLoS articles, noting differences in behaviour.”
Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank (2013, background): “…to perform in an unbiased, dynamic way on a per-article basis, allowing the research community greater control over selection, filtering, and ranking of scientific information (Hönekopp and Khan, 2011; Kravitz and Baker, 2011; Lin, 2012; Priem et al., 2012; Roemer and Borchardt, 2012; Priem, 2013).”