When are readership counts as useful as citation counts? S copus versus M endeley for LIS journals

Nabeil Maflahi · Mike A Thelwall

127 citations0/0 files storedJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

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scientometrics and bibliometrics research Library Science and Information Web visibility and informetrics

Abstract

In theory, articles can attract readers on the social reference sharing site M endeley before they can attract citations, so M endeley altmetrics could provide early indications of article impact. This article investigates the influence of time on the number of M endeley readers of an article through a theoretical discussion and an investigation into the relationship between counts of readers of, and citations to, 4 general library and information science ( LIS ) journals. For this discipline, it takes about 7 years for articles to attract as many S copus citations as M endeley readers, and after this the S pearman correlation between readers and citers is stable at about 0.6 for all years. This suggests that M endeley readership counts may be useful impact indicators for both newer and older articles. The lack of dates for individual M endeley article readers and an unknown bias toward more recent articles mean that readership data should be normalized individually by year, however, before making any comparisons between articles published in different years.

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References

1976A general theory of bibliometric and other cumulative advantage processes 2011Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact 2013Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services 2014Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective 2004Sleeping Beauties in science 2003Impact factors: use and abuse.2013Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature 2013The publishing delay in scholarly peer-reviewed journals

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2015M endeley readership altmetrics for medical articles: An analysis of 45 fields 2018Authorship, citations, acknowledgments and visibility in social media: Symbolic capital in the multifaceted reward system of science 2019Social Media Metrics for New Research Evaluation 2015Web indicators for research evaluation. Part 2: Social media metrics 2015M endeley readership counts: An investigation of temporal and disciplinary differences

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