Altmetrics of "altmetrics" using Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google-plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki

TL;DR

This study evaluates the impact of altmetrics across various social media platforms from 2010 to 2014, introducing an alt-index and analyzing correlations with traditional metrics.

Contribution

It proposes the alt-index to measure social impact and analyzes the correlation between social and scholarly citations across multiple platforms.

Findings

High correlation among social impact indicators.

Social citations are 42.2% higher than traditional citations.

Twitter and Mendeley are the most effective social impact channels.

Abstract

We measure the impact of "altmetrics" field by deploying altmetrics indicators using the data from Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google-plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki during 2010- 2014. To capture the social impact of scientific publications, we propose an index called alt-index, analogues to h-index. Across the deployed indices, our results have shown high correlation among the indicators that capture social impact. While we observe medium Pearson's correlation (\r{ho}= .247) among the alt-index and h-index, a relatively high correlation is observed between social citations and scholarly citations (\r{ho}= .646). Interestingly, we find high turnover of social citations in the field compared with the traditional scholarly citations, i.e. social citations are 42.2 % more than traditional citations. The social mediums such as Twitter and Mendeley appear to be the most effective channels of social impact followed by Facebook and Google-plus. Overall, altmetrics appears to be working well in the field of "altmetrics".