Abstract
This paper examines the data accuracy and number of altmetric counts reported by Mendeley, altmetric.com and PlumX at two points in time: June 2017 and April 2018 for the dataset of 2,728 articles and reviews published in JASIST between 2001 and 2014. The findings show growth in the number of citations and Mendeley readers over time. In addition, the results also show that there are differences in the altmetric counts reported by the two-altmetric aggregators Altmetric.com and PlumX.
Highlights
Since its inception in 2010 (Priem et al, 2010) altmetrics has been actively promoted as a new set of indicators appropriate to be used for evaluating and capturing the broader impact of scholarly output
Bar-Ilan et al: Differences between Altmetric Data Sources – A Case Study errors that can be found in the metadata fields, which prevent Mendeley to correctly aggregate reader counts, and quite often there is more than one record for a given item
Coverage overlap between Mendeley, Altmetric.com and PlumX Figure 2a and 2b show the number of documents for which Mendeley readership counts were reported by the three sources in 2017 and 2018 respectively
Summary
Since its inception in 2010 (Priem et al, 2010) altmetrics has been actively promoted as a new set of indicators appropriate to be used for evaluating and capturing the broader impact of scholarly output. Altmetric.com and PlumX are aggregators that report multiple altmetrics, including the number of tweets, blogs, Wikipedia and news mentions Bar-Ilan et al: Differences between Altmetric Data Sources – A Case Study errors that can be found in the metadata fields, which prevent Mendeley to correctly aggregate reader counts, and quite often there is more than one record for a given item. Coverage overlap between Mendeley, Altmetric.com and PlumX Figure 2a and 2b show the number of documents for which Mendeley readership counts were reported by the three sources in 2017 and 2018 respectively. We have no explanation for this discrepancy in the number of tweets reported; it might have been an unintentional error by PlumX
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