On the relationships between bibliographic characteristics of scientific documents and citation and Mendeley readership counts: A large-scale analysis of Web of Science publications

TL;DR

This large-scale study investigates how bibliographic features of scientific articles relate to citation and Mendeley readership counts, revealing that readership can complement citation analysis across various document types and disciplines.

Contribution

The paper provides the first large-scale analysis of the relationship between bibliographic characteristics, citations, and Mendeley readership across multiple fields.

Findings

Mendeley readership covers document types with low citation counts, like editorials and news.

Collaborative papers tend to have higher readership and citation counts.

Disciplinary differences influence the relationship between document features, citations, and readership.

Abstract

In this paper we present a first large-scale analysis of the relationship between Mendeley readership and citation counts with particular documents bibliographic characteristics. A data set of 1.3 million publications from different fields published in journals covered by the Web of Science (WoS) has been analyzed. This work reveals that document types that are often excluded from citation analysis due to their lower citation values, like editorial materials, letters, or news items, are strongly covered and saved in Mendeley, suggesting that Mendeley readership can reliably inform the analysis of these document types. Findings show that collaborative papers are frequently saved in Mendeley, which is similar to what is observed for citations. The relationship between readership and the length of titles and number of pages, however, is weaker than for the same relationship observed for citations. The analysis of different disciplines also points to different patterns in the relationship between several document characteristics, readership, and citation counts. Overall, results highlight that although disciplinary differences exist, readership counts are related to similar bibliographic characteristics as those related to citation counts, reinforcing the idea that Mendeley readership and citations capture a similar concept of impact, although they cannot be considered as equivalent indicators.