How much research output from India gets social media attention?

TL;DR

This study investigates the extent and patterns of social media attention received by Indian scholarly articles, revealing lower coverage compared to the global average and discipline-specific variations.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of social media coverage of Indian research output and compares it with global trends across disciplines.

Findings

28.5% of Indian research is covered in social media, 18% less than the world average.

ResearchGate and Mendeley are the most used platforms for Indian research.

Medical and biological sciences have higher social media coverage than engineering and information science.

Abstract

Scholarly articles are now increasingly being mentioned and discussed in social media platforms, sometimes even as pre- or post-print version uploads. Measures of social media mentions and coverage are now emerging as an alternative indicator of impact of scholarly articles. This article aims to explore how much scholarly research output from India is covered in different social media platforms, and how similar or different it is from the world average. It also analyses the discipline-wise variations in coverage and altmetric attention for Indian research output, including a comparison with the world average. Results obtained show interesting patterns. Only 28.5% of the total research output from India is covered in social media platforms, which is about 18% less than the world average. ResearchGate and Mendeley are the most popular social media platforms in India for scholarly article coverage. In terms of discipline-wise variation, medical sciences and biological sciences have relatively higher coverage across different platforms compared to disciplines like information science and engineering.