Beyond citations: Scholars' visibility on the social Web

TL;DR

This study explores scholars' visibility on social Web platforms, revealing widespread presence and correlations between social bookmarks and traditional citation metrics, thus expanding understanding of scholarly impact beyond citations.

Contribution

It provides empirical data on scholars' social Web presence and compares social media metrics with traditional citation measures, highlighting new dimensions of scholarly visibility.

Findings

84% of scholars have personal homepages

70% are on LinkedIn, 23% on Google Scholar, 16% on Twitter

Mendeley bookmarks correlate significantly with citation counts

Abstract

Traditionally, scholarly impact and visibility have been measured by counting publications and citations in the scholarly literature. However, increasingly scholars are also visible on the Web, establishing presences in a growing variety of social ecosystems. But how wide and established is this presence, and how do measures of social Web impact relate to their more traditional counterparts? To answer this, we sampled 57 presenters from the 2010 Leiden STI Conference, gathering publication and citations counts as well as data from the presenters' Web "footprints." We found Web presence widespread and diverse: 84% of scholars had homepages, 70% were on LinkedIn, 23% had public Google Scholar profiles, and 16% were on Twitter. For sampled scholars' publications, social reference manager bookmarks were compared to Scopus and Web of Science citations; we found that Mendeley covers more than 80% of sampled articles, and that Mendeley bookmarks are significantly correlated (r=.45) to Scopus citation counts.