Altmetrics of “altmetrics” using Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google-plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki

We measure the impact of “altmetrics” field by deploying altmetrics indicators using the data from Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google-plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki during 2010- 2014.

To capture the social impact of scientific publications, we propose an index called alt-index, analogues to h-index. Across the deployed indices, our results have shown high correlation among the indicators that capture social impact.

While we observe medium Pearson’s correlation (\r{ho}= .247) among the alt-index and h-index, a relatively high correlation is observed between social citations and scholarly citations (\r{ho}= .646). Interestingly, we find high turnover of social citations in the field compared with the traditional scholarly citations, i.e. social citations are 42.2 % more than traditional citations.

The social mediums such as Twitter and Mendeley appear to be the most effective channels of social impact followed by Facebook and Google-plus. Overall, altmetrics appears to be working well in the field of “altmetrics”.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.07992