Abstract
Although bibliometrics are normally applied to journal articles when used to support research evaluations, conference papers are at least as important in fast-moving computing-related fields. It is therefore important to assess the relative advantages of citations and altmetrics for computing conference papers to make an informed decision about which, if any, to use. This paper compares Scopus citations with Mendeley reader counts for conference papers and journal articles that were published between 1996 and 2018 in 11 computing fields and that had at least one US author. The data showed high correlations between Scopus citation counts and Mendeley reader counts in all fields and most years, but with few Mendeley readers for older conference papers and few Scopus citations for new conference papers and journal articles. The results therefore suggest that Mendeley reader counts have a substantial advantage over citation counts for recently published conference papers due to their greater speed, but are unsuitable for older conference papers.
Highlights
Altmetrics, social media indicators for the impact of academic research derived from the web (Priem, Taraborelli, Groth, & Neylon, 2010), are widely available to help assess academic outputs
Many studies have investigated the extent to which altmetrics can be helpful for impact evaluations, including a few showing that early altmetric scores correlate with longer term citation counts (Eysenbach, 2011; Thelwall & Nevill, 2018)
A limitation of almost all prior research is that it has focused on altmetrics for refereed journal articles, whereas monographs, conference papers or other outputs can be more important in some fields
Summary
Altmetrics, social media indicators for the impact of academic research derived from the web (Priem, Taraborelli, Groth, & Neylon, 2010), are widely available to help assess academic outputs. Many studies have investigated the extent to which altmetrics can be helpful for impact evaluations, including a few showing that early altmetric scores correlate with longer term citation counts (Eysenbach, 2011; Thelwall & Nevill, 2018). A limitation of almost all prior research is that it has focused on altmetrics for refereed journal articles, whereas monographs, conference papers or other outputs can be more important in some fields. This article assesses the value of one key altmetric, Mendeley reader counts, for conference papers. One small scale investigation has previously investigated this (Aduku, Thelwall, & Kousha, 2017), a comprehensive evaluation is needed
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