From attention to citation: What are altmetrics and how do they work?

Scholarly and social impacts of scientific publications could be measured by various metrics, including article usage, Mendeley readership and Altmetric scores, etc. But what is the relationship amongst the different metrics? Previous studies show there is low correlation between altmetrics and citation, but how do altmetrics compare to other metrics? Xianwen Wang and his colleagues recently conducted a study to answer this question

Tracking the digital footprints to scholarly articles: the fast accumulation and rapid decay of social media referrals

Academics are increasingly encouraged to share their scholarly articles via social media, as part of a wider drive to maximize their dissemination and engagement. But what effect does this have? Xianwen Wang has studied the referral data of academic papers, with particular focus on social media referrals and how these change over time. Referrals from social media do indeed account for a significant number of visits to articles, especially in the days immediately following publication. But this fast initial accumulation soon gives way to a rapid decay

Social Media Attention Increases Article Visits: An Investigation on Article-Level Referral Data of PeerJ

In order to better understand the effect of social media in the dissemination of scholarly articles, employing the daily updated referral data of 110 PeerJ articles collected over a period of 345 days, we analyze the relationship between social media attention and article visitors directed by social media. Our results show that social media presence of PeerJ articles is high. About 68.18% of the papers receive at least one tweet from Twitter accounts other than @PeerJ, the official account of the journal. Social media attention increases the dissemination of scholarly articles. Altmetrics could not only act as the complement of traditional citation measures but also play an important role in increasing the article downloads and promoting the impacts of scholarly articles. There also exists a significant correlation among the online attention from different social media platforms. Articles with more Facebook shares tend to get more tweets. The temporal trends show that social attention comes immediately following publication but does not last long, so do the social media directed article views

Usage History of Scientific Literature: Nature Metrics and Metrics of Nature Publications

In this study, we analyze the dynamic usage history of Nature publications over time using Nature metrics data. We conduct analysis from two perspectives. On the one hand, we examine how long it takes before the articles' downloads reach 50%/80% of the total; on the other hand, we compare the percentage of total downloads in 7 days, 30 days, and 100 days after publication. In general, papers are downloaded most frequently within a short time period right after their publication. And we find that compared with Non-Open Access papers, readers' attention on Open Access publications are more enduring. Based on the usage data of a newly published paper, regression analysis could predict the future expected total usage counts.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures and 4 table