Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective
By Rodrigo Costas, Zohreh Zahedi, Paul F. Wouters. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2014
759 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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. Our results confirm that the presence and density of social media altmetric counts are still very low and not very frequent among scientific publications, with 15%–24% of the publications presenting some altmetric activity and concentrated on the most recent publications, although their presence is increasing over time. Publications from the social sciences, humanities, and the medical and life sciences show the highest presence of altmetrics, indicating their potential value and interest for these fields. The analysis of the relationships between altmetrics and citations confirms previous claims of positive correlations but is relatively weak, thus supporting the idea that altmetrics do not reflect the same kind of impact as citations. Also, altmetric counts do not always present a better filtering of highly‐cited publications than journal citation scores. Altmetric scores (particularly mentions in blogs) are able to identify highly‐cited publications with higher levels of precision than journal citation scores (JCS), but they have a lower level of recall. The value of altmetrics as a complementary tool of citation analysis is highlighted, although more research is suggested to disentangle the potential meaning and value of altmetric indicators for research evaluation.
Subfields: History and Philosophy of Science, Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb6becddfc1ba17795ec7a832724a893b0502fc0
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In History and Philosophy of Science
In Information Systems and Management
In Statistics and Probability
Citations in the corpus
- Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature (2016, background): “…et al., 2014; Priem, Piwowar, et al., 2012), with 60–80% of articles having at least one reader (Alhoori & Furuta, 2014; Bar-Ilan et al., 2012; Costas et al., 2014; Hammarfelt, 2014; Haustein, Peters, Bar-Ilan, et al., 2014; Haustein & Larivière, 2014; Haustein, Larivière, Thelwall, et…”
- Characterizing Social Media Metrics of Scholarly Papers: The Effect of Document Properties and Collaboration Patterns (2015, background): “Selecting 2012 publications also has the advantage of guaranteeing complete coverage of social media data for the whole year, as Altmetric.com started data collection mid-2011 [30].”