Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The thematic orientation of publications mentioned on social media

The thematic orientation of publications mentioned on social media Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to analyze the disciplinary orientation of scientific publications that were mentioned on different social media platforms, focussing on their differences and similarities with citation counts. Design/methodology/approach– Social media metrics and readership counts, associated with 500,216 publications and their citation data from the Web of Science database, were collected from Altmetric.com and Mendeley. Results are presented through descriptive statistical analyses together with science maps generated with VOSviewer. Findings– The results confirm Mendeley as the most prevalent social media source with similar characteristics to citations in their distribution across fields and their density in average values per publication. The humanities, natural sciences, and engineering disciplines have a much lower presence of social media metrics. Twitter has a stronger focus on general medicine and social sciences. Other sources (blog, Facebook, Google+, and news media mentions) are more prominent in regards to multidisciplinary journals. Originality/value– This paper reinforces the relevance of Mendeley as a social media source for analytical purposes from a disciplinary perspective, being particularly relevant for the social sciences (together with Twitter). Key implications for the use of social media metrics on the evaluation of research performance (e.g. the concentration of some social media metrics, such as blogs, news items, etc., around multidisciplinary journals) are identified. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Aslib Journal of Information Management Emerald Publishing

The thematic orientation of publications mentioned on social media

Download PDF
29 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/emerald-publishing/the-thematic-orientation-of-publications-mentioned-on-social-media-I506I7Y20w
Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
Copyright © Emerald Group Publishing Limited
ISSN
2050-3806
DOI
10.1108/AJIM-12-2014-0173
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to analyze the disciplinary orientation of scientific publications that were mentioned on different social media platforms, focussing on their differences and similarities with citation counts. Design/methodology/approach– Social media metrics and readership counts, associated with 500,216 publications and their citation data from the Web of Science database, were collected from Altmetric.com and Mendeley. Results are presented through descriptive statistical analyses together with science maps generated with VOSviewer. Findings– The results confirm Mendeley as the most prevalent social media source with similar characteristics to citations in their distribution across fields and their density in average values per publication. The humanities, natural sciences, and engineering disciplines have a much lower presence of social media metrics. Twitter has a stronger focus on general medicine and social sciences. Other sources (blog, Facebook, Google+, and news media mentions) are more prominent in regards to multidisciplinary journals. Originality/value– This paper reinforces the relevance of Mendeley as a social media source for analytical purposes from a disciplinary perspective, being particularly relevant for the social sciences (together with Twitter). Key implications for the use of social media metrics on the evaluation of research performance (e.g. the concentration of some social media metrics, such as blogs, news items, etc., around multidisciplinary journals) are identified.

Journal

Aslib Journal of Information Management – Emerald Publishing

Published: May 18, 2015

There are no references for this article.