Analyzing readerships of International Iranian publications in Mendeley: an altmetrics study

TL;DR

This study examines the impact and visibility of Iranian international journal publications by analyzing Mendeley readerships and Web of Science citations, exploring their relationship and distribution across various factors.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of Mendeley readership and citation impact for Iranian publications, revealing their correlation and distribution patterns.

Findings

Mendeley readerships vary across publication years, fields, and document types.

There is a measurable relationship between Mendeley readership counts and WoS citations.

Readership data offers additional insights into publication impact beyond citations.

Abstract

In this study, the presence and distribution of both Mendeley readerships and Web of Science citations for the publications published in the 43 Iranian international journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports have been investigated. The aim was to determine the impact, visibility and use of the publications published by the Iranian international journals in Mendeley compared to their citation impact; furthermore, to explore if there is any relation between these two impact indicators (Mendeley readership counts and WoS citation counts) for these publications. The DOIs of the 1,884 publications used to extract the readerships data from Mendeley REST API in February 2014 and citations data until end of 2013 calculated using CWTS in-house WoS database. SPSS (version 21) used to analyze the relationship between the readerships and citations for those publications. The Mendeley usage distribution both at the publication level (across publications years, fields and document types) and at the user level (across users disciplines, academic status and countries) have been investigated. These information will help to understand the visibility and usage vs citation pattern and impact of Iranian scientific outputs.