Weighted Altmetric Scores to Facilitate Literature Analyses

Abstract

With a rapidly increasing corpus of published papers, assessing their scientific impact has become increasingly challenging. Particularly, for analysts performing systematic literature analysis, such as a systematic literature review or systematic mapping study, the problem of manually assessing a large data set has now become quite evident. Thus, the research community is actively involved in developing techniques relying on different methods to determine impact of a paper with reduced manual effort, for example, using bibliometrics, and the more recently introduced, altmetrics. Therefore, in this work we extend the ongoing investigation and propose weighted altmetric scores for a more fair and reliable analysis of papers, eventually supporting the literature analysis process. Our findings show that weighted altmetrics perform well and achieve an accuracy of 69.81% considerably reducing the time and effort required for a manual literature analysis.