Tweets vs. Mendeley readers: How do these two social media metrics differ?

TL;DR

This study compares Twitter mentions and Mendeley saves for 1.4 million biomedical papers, highlighting differences in their use as altmetrics and their relation to traditional citation impact.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale analysis of how Twitter and Mendeley metrics differ and relate to traditional citation metrics in biomedical research.

Findings

Twitter and Mendeley metrics show distinct usage patterns.

Mendeley saves correlate more strongly with citation counts.

Twitter mentions reflect broader public engagement.

Abstract

A set of 1.4 million biomedical papers was analyzed with regards to how often articles are mentioned on Twitter or saved by users on Mendeley. While Twitter is a microblogging platform used by a general audience to distribute information, Mendeley is a reference manager targeted at an academic user group to organize scholarly literature. Both platforms are used as sources for so-called altmetrics to measure a new kind of research impact. This analysis shows in how far they differ and compare to traditional citation impact metrics based on a large set of PubMed papers.