Can Google Scholar and Mendeley help to assess the scholarly impacts of dissertations?

Authors : Kayvan Kousha, Mike Thelwall

Dissertations can be the single most important scholarly outputs of junior researchers. Whilst sets of journal articles are often evaluated with the help of citation counts from the Web of Science or Scopus, these do not index dissertations and so their impact is hard to assess.

In response, this article introduces a new multistage method to extract Google Scholar citation counts for large collections of dissertations from repositories indexed by Google.

The method was used to extract Google Scholar citation counts for 77,884 American doctoral dissertations from 2013-2017 via ProQuest, with a precision of over 95%. Some ProQuest dissertations that were dual indexed with other repositories could not be retrieved with ProQuest-specific searches but could be found with Google Scholar searches of the other repositories.

The Google Scholar citation counts were then compared with Mendeley reader counts, a known source of scholarly-like impact data. A fifth of the dissertations had at least one citation recorded in Google Scholar and slightly fewer had at least one Mendeley reader.

Based on numerical comparisons, the Mendeley reader counts seem to be more useful for impact assessment purposes for dissertations that are less than two years old, whilst Google Scholar citations are more useful for older dissertations, especially in social sciences, arts and humanities.

Google Scholar citation counts may reflect a more scholarly type of impact than that of Mendeley reader counts because dissertations attract a substantial minority of their citations from other dissertations.

In summary, the new method now makes it possible for research funders, institutions and others to systematically evaluate the impact of dissertations, although additional Google Scholar queries for other online repositories are needed to ensure comprehensive coverage.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.08746

The counting house: measuring those who count. Presence of Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Informetrics, Webometrics and Altmetrics in the Google Scholar Citations, ResearcherID, ResearchGate, Mendeley & Twitter

Authors : Alberto Martin-Martin, Enrique Orduna-Malea, Juan M. Ayllon, Emilio Delgado Lopez-Cozar

Following in the footsteps of the model of scientific communication, which has recently gone through a metamorphosis (from the Gutenberg galaxy to the Web galaxy), a change in the model and methods of scientific evaluation is also taking place.

A set of new scientific tools are now providing a variety of indicators which measure all actions and interactions among scientists in the digital space, making new aspects of scientific communication emerge.

In this work we present a method for capturing the structure of an entire scientific community (the Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Informetrics, Webometrics, and Altmetrics community) and the main agents that are part of it (scientists, documents, and sources) through the lens of Google Scholar Citations.

Additionally, we compare these author portraits to the ones offered by other profile or social platforms currently used by academics (ResearcherID, ResearchGate, Mendeley, and Twitter), in order to test their degree of use, completeness, reliability, and the validity of the information they provide.

A sample of 814 authors (researchers in Bibliometrics with a public profile created in Google Scholar Citations was subsequently searched in the other platforms, collecting the main indicators computed by each of them.

The data collection was carried out on September, 2015. The Spearman correlation was applied to these indicators (a total of 31) , and a Principal Component Analysis was carried out in order to reveal the relationships among metrics and platforms as well as the possible existence of metric cluster.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02412

How quickly do publications get read? The evolution of Mendeley reader counts for new articles

Authors : Nabeil Maflahi, Mike Thelwall

Within science, citation counts are widely used to estimate research impact but publication delays mean that they are not useful for recent research. This gap can be filled by Mendeley reader counts, which are valuable early impact indicators for academic articles because they appear before citations and correlate strongly with them.

Nevertheless, it is not known how Mendeley readership counts accumulate within the year of publication, and so it is unclear how soon they can be used. In response, this paper reports a longitudinal weekly study of the Mendeley readers of articles in six library and information science journals from 2016.

The results suggest that Mendeley readers accrue from when articles are first available online and continue to steadily build. For journals with large publication delays, articles can already have substantial numbers of readers by their publication date.

Thus, Mendeley reader counts may even be useful as early impact indicators for articles before they have been officially published in a journal issue. If field normalised indicators are needed, then these can be generated when journal issues are published using the online first date.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/2436/620522

 

F1000, Mendeley and Traditional Bibliometric Indicators

This article compares the Faculty of 1000 (F1000) quality filtering results and Mendeley usage data with traditional bibliometric indicators, using a sample of 1397 Genomics and Genetics articles published in 2008 selected by F1000 Faculty Members (FMs). Both Mendeley user counts and F1000 article factors (FFas) correlate significantly with citation counts and associated Journal Impact Factors. However, the correlations for Mendeley user counts are much larger than those for FFas.

It may be that F1000 is good at disclosing the merit of an article from an expert practitioner point of view while Mendeley user counts may be more closely related to traditional citation impact. Articles that attract exceptionally many citations are generally disorder or disease related, while those with extremely high social bookmark user counts are mainly historical or introductory.

URL : http://2012.sticonference.org/Proceedings/vol2/Li_F1000_541.pdf

Research Communications Strategy : “Thi…

Research Communications Strategy :

“This report is in two distinct, but connected, sections. They address a common theme: the scope of current OA practice and the opportunities it offers for innovation in scholarly communication methods.

*Section 1 takes as its starting point the apparent reluctance of individual academics fully to embrace OA, and suggests that the potential offered by OA for various kinds of added value might be an effective tool in advocacy.

*Section 2 considers the relation of OA to services such as Mendeley, and wonders whether our established view of OA as a way to distribute traditional research outputs more efficiently might come to seem outmoded in the face of new, non-traditional ideas about how to conduct and disseminate research.”

URL : http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/502/