COVID-19 publications: Database coverage, citations, readers, tweets, news, Facebook walls, Reddit posts

© 2020 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00066The COVID-19 pandemic requires a fast response from researchers to help address biological, medical and public health issues to minimize its impact. In this rapidly evolving context, scholars, professionals and the public may need to quickly identify important new studies. In response, this paper assesses the coverage of scholarly databases and impact indicators during 21 March to 18 April 2020. The rapidly increasing volume of research, is particularly accessible through Dimensions, and less through Scopus, the Web of Science, and PubMed. Google Scholar’s results included many false matches. A few COVID-19 papers from the 21,395 in Dimensions were already highly cited, with substantial news and social media attention. For this topic, in contrast to previous studies, there seems to be a high degree of convergence between articles shared in the social web and citation counts, at least in the short term. In particular, articles that are extensively tweeted on the day first indexed are likely to be highly read and relatively highly cited three weeks later. Researchers needing wide scope literature searches (rather than health focused PubMed or medRxiv searches) should start with Dimensions (or Google Scholar) and can use tweet and Mendeley reader counts as indicators of likely importance

Do journal data sharing mandates work? Life sciences evidence from Dryad

Purpose: Data sharing is widely thought to help research quality and efficiency. Since data sharing mandates are increasingly adopted by journals this paper assesses whether they work. Design/methodology: This study examines two evolutionary biology journals, Evolution and Heredity, that have data sharing mandates and make extensive use of Dryad. It uses a quantitative analysis of presence in Dryad, downloads and citations. Findings: Within both journals, data sharing seems to be complete showing that the mandates work on a technical level. Low correlations (0.15-0.18) between data downloads and article citation counts for articles published in 2012 within these journals indicate a weak relationship between data sharing and research impact. An average of 40-55 data downloads per article after a few years suggests that some use is found for shared life sciences data. Research limitations: The value of shared data uses is unclear. Practical implications: Data sharing mandates should be encouraged as an effective strategy. Originality/value: This is the first analysis of the effectiveness of data sharing mandates

Do Mendeley reader counts indicate the value of arts and humanities research?

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Sage in Journal of Librarianship and Information Science on 19/09/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000617732381 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Mendeley reader counts are a good source of early impact evidence for the life and natural sciences articles because they are abundant, appear before citations, and correlate moderately or strongly with citations in the long term. Early studies have found less promising results for the humanities and this article assesses whether the situation has now changed. Using Mendeley reader counts for articles in twelve arts and humanities Scopus subcategories, the results show that Mendeley reader counts reflect Scopus citation counts in most arts and humanities as strongly as in other areas of scholarship. Thus, Mendeley can be used as an early citation impact indicator in the arts and humanities, although it is unclear whether reader or citation counts reflect the underlying value of arts and humanities research

Are citations from clinical trials evidence of higher impact research? An analysis of ClinicalTrials.gov

An important way in which medical research can translate into improved health outcomes is by motivating or influencing clinical trials that eventually lead to changes in clinical practice. Citations from clinical trials records to academic research may therefore serve as an early warning of the likely future influence of the cited articles. This paper partially assesses this hypothesis by testing whether prior articles referenced in ClinicalTrials.gov records are more highly cited than average for the publishing journal. The results from four high profile general medical journals support the hypothesis, although there may not be a cause-and effect relationship. Nevertheless, it is reasonable for researchers to use citations to their work from clinical trials records as partial evidence of the possible long-term impact of their research