From Attention to Citation, What and How Does Altmetrics Work?

TL;DR

This study analyzes how different altmetrics relate to citations in scientific articles, highlighting that article views, especially PDF downloads, are strongly correlated with citations, and social attention influences article views and impact.

Contribution

It introduces a conceptual model explaining how social attention can lead to increased article views and citations, emphasizing the importance of detailed metrics for scholarly impact.

Findings

PDF downloads correlate most with citations

Social attention strongly influences article views

High altmetric scores may boost long-term impact

Abstract

Scholarly and social impacts of scientific publications could be measured by various metrics. In this study, the relationship between various metrics of 63,805 PLOS research articles are studied. Generally, article views correlate well with citation, however, different types of article view have different levels of correlation with citation, when pdf download correlates the citation most significantly. It's necessary for publishers and journals to provide detailed and comprehensive article metrics. Although the low correlation between social attention and citation is confirmed by this study and previous studies, more than ever, we find that social attention is highly correlated with article view, especially the browser html view. Social attention is the important source that bringing network traffic to browser html view and may lead to citation subsequently. High altmetric score has the potential role in promoting the long-term academic impact of articles, when a conceptual model is proposed to interpret the conversion from social attention to article view, and to citation finally.