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Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community

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Abstract

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 in the social web. We tested this assumption by examining the use and coverage of social media environments amongst a sample of bibliometricians examining both their own use of online platforms and the use of their papers on social reference managers. 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 counts. We conducted a survey among the participants of the STI2012 participants. 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.

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Notes

  1. As reported on mendeley.com on November 15, 2013.

  2. Some presenters were omitted either because they had not published in sources covered by Scopus or WoS or due to ambiguous names, for which relevant papers could not be identified. Documents without a doi were not considered as it was needed to identify papers on some of the altmetrics platforms. For a more detailed description of data collection, see Bar-Ilan et al. (2012).

  3. http://impactstory.org.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, Université de Montréal, Montréal (Canada) and Science-Metrix, 1335 Avenue Mont-Royal Est, Montreal, QC, H2J 1Y6, Canada

    Stefanie Haustein

  2. ZBW – German National Library of Economics, Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Duesternbrooker Weg 120, 24105, Kiel, Germany

    Isabella Peters

  3. Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University, 5290002, Ramat-Gan, Israel

    Judit Bar-Ilan & Hadas Shema

  4. School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 216 Lenoir Drive, Manning Hall, Chapel Hill, NC, 3360100, USA

    Jason Priem

  5. Department of Information Science, Heinrich Heine University, Universitaetsstr. 1, 40225, Duesseldorf, Germany

    Jens Terliesner

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  1. Stefanie Haustein
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  2. Isabella Peters
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  3. Judit Bar-Ilan
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Correspondence to Judit Bar-Ilan.

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Haustein, S., Peters, I., Bar-Ilan, J. et al. Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community. Scientometrics 101, 1145–1163 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1221-3

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