Abstract
The aim of this paper is to compare and analyse the availability of blogs and news links from the three most important altmetric data providers (Altmetric.com, PlumX and Crossref Event Data, CED). In addition, the study explores the distribution of events by creation year in order to observe the coverage of old and new events. Researchers extracted 51,000 links from news and blogs from those providers. Those links were analysed with a link checker (Xenu’s Link Sleuth), and the statuses of those links in 2019 January were at the center of the study. The results show that 35.6% of news in Altmetric.com are not accessible and 28.9% of blog mentions in PlumX point to a broken link. These worrying percentages of broken links are due, mainly, to the employment of third parties to supply news and blog events. Altmetric.com is the service that provides a better-balanced distribution of events, while PlumX and CED group their events around the last two years. The study concludes that these aggregators need to develop a specific policy to improve the audit of these data for research evaluation processes (saving a copy of the event, employing more frequently crawls, avoiding external providers, etc.).
Highlights
Altmetrics data providers are becoming indispensable tools for observing the impact of research outputs in a wide range of societal environments
More recently, Thelwall (2018) studied the presence of a sample of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities publications from Scopus in Altmetric.com. He found that 35% of articles in social sciences and 15% in arts and humanities fields were tweeted. These results suggest that only a small fraction of papers from Scopus are indexed in Altmetrics and social sciences and humanities outputs are less mentioned than STEM papers
How do data providers cover blogs and news according to publication date?. This experiment tries to analyse the persistence of web links using a previous sample of 51,000 links to blog posts and news from three important altmetric data providers: Altmetric.com, PlumX and Crossref Event Data (Ortega 2019)
Summary
Altmetrics data providers are becoming indispensable tools for observing the impact of research outputs in a wide range of societal environments. From the public discussion of new results in online social networks to the mention of research articles in patent applications, these services capture the footprint of the scholarly results in web spaces representative of different social spheres These services provide counts and links that allow users to find out when, where and how many times a document is mentioned in anywhere on the Web. Basically, these services provide counts and links that allow users to find out when, where and how many times a document is mentioned in anywhere on the Web In this way, web links are critical elements to verify that an event has occured, and threfore to audit the existience of the event. Altmetric.com does not include Mendeley readers in its Attention Score because Mendeley does not permit the site to insert a direct link that allows to verify the real number of readers (Altmetric.com 2019)
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