Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community

Altmetrics, indices based on social media platforms and tools, have recently emerged as alternative means of measuring scholarly impact. Such indices assume that scholars in fact populate online social environments, and interact with scholarly products there. We tested this assumption by examining the use and coverage of social media environments amongst a sample of bibliometricians. As expected, coverage varied: 82% of articles published by sampled bibliometricians were included in Mendeley libraries, while only 28% were included in CiteULike. Mendeley bookmarking was moderately correlated (.45) with Scopus citation. Over half of respondents asserted that social media tools were affecting their professional lives, although uptake of online tools varied widely. 68% of those surveyed had LinkedIn accounts, while Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate each claimed a fifth of respondents. Nearly half of those responding had Twitter accounts, which they used both personally and professionally. Surveyed bibliometricians had mixed opinions on altmetrics’ potential 72% valued download counts, while a third saw potential in tracking articles’ influence in blogs, Wikipedia, reference managers, and social media. Altogether, these findings suggest that some online tools are seeing substantial use by bibliometricians, and that they present a potentially valuable source of impact data

Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information

The research blog has become a popular mechanism for the quick discussion of scholarly information. However, unlike peer-reviewed journals, the characteristics of this form of scientific discourse are not well understood, for example in terms of the spread of blogger levels of education, gender and institutional affiliations. In this paper we fill this gap by analyzing a sample of blog posts discussing science via an aggregator called ResearchBlogging.org (RB). ResearchBlogging.org aggregates posts based on peer-reviewed research and allows bloggers to cite their sources in a scholarly manner. We studied the bloggers, blog posts and referenced journals of bloggers who posted at least 20 items. We found that RB bloggers show a preference for papers from high-impact journals and blog mostly about research in the life and behavioral sciences. The most frequently referenced journal sources in the sample were: Science, Nature, PNAS and PLoS One. Most of the bloggers in our sample had active Twitter accounts connected with their blogs, and at least 90% of these accounts connect to at least one other RB-related Twitter account. The average RB blogger in our sample is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name

Scholars are quickly moving toward a universe of web-native communication

Jason Priem, Judit Bar-Ilan, Stefanie Haustein, Isabella Peters, Hadas Shema, and Jens Terliesner get a sense of how established the academic presence is online, and how an individual academic online profile can stand up to traditional measurements of number of publications and citations

Abstract How is Research Blogged? A Content Analysis Approach

Blogs that cite academic articles have emerged as a potential source for alternative impact metrics for the visibility of the blogged articles. Nevertheless, in order to more fully evaluate the value of blog citations, it is necessary to investigate whether research blogs focus on particular types of articles or give new perspectives into scientific discourse. Thus, we studied the characteristics of peer-reviewed references in blogs and the typical content of blog posts to get insights into the bloggers ’ motivations. The sample consisted of 391 blog posts from 2010-2012 in Researchblogging.org’s Health category. The bloggers mostly cited recent research articles or reviews from top multidisciplinary and general medical journals. Using content analysis methods, we created a general classification scheme for blog post content with ten major topic categories, each with several subcategories. The results suggest that health research bloggers rarely self-cite and the vast majority of their blog posts (90%) include a general discussion of the issue covered in the article, with over a quarter providing health-related advice based on the article(s) covered. These factors suggest a genuine attempt to engage with a wider nonacademic audience. Nevertheless, almost 30 % of the posts included some criticism of the issues being discussed. Given that explicit criticism is rare in academic articles, this suggests that blogs are a more natural home for this important scientific activity

Distribution of bloggers’ education levels.

<p>Distribution of bloggers’ education levels.</p

Subject categories for journals cited at least twice in the 5 most recent blog posts for the 126 blogs with multidisciplinary papers manually classified into categories.

<p>Subject categories for journals cited at least twice in the 5 most recent blog posts for the 126 blogs with multidisciplinary papers manually classified into categories.</p

Twitter interconnections – followers.

<p>Twitter interconnections – followers.</p

Number of references per journal cited in the 5 most recent blog posts for the 126 blogs.

<p>Number of references per journal cited in the 5 most recent blog posts for the 126 blogs.</p