Abstract
Medical research is highly funded and often expensive and so is particularly important to evaluate effectively. Nevertheless, citation counts may accrue too slowly for use in some formal and informal evaluations. It is therefore important to investigate whether alternative metrics could be used as substitutes. This article assesses whether one such altmetric, Mendeley readership counts, correlates strongly with citation counts across all medical fields, whether the relationship is stronger if student readers are excluded, and whether they are distributed similarly to citation counts. Based on a sample of 332,975 articles from 2009 in 45 medical fields in Scopus, citation counts correlated strongly (about 0.7; 78% of articles had at least one reader) with Mendeley readership counts (from the new version 1 applications programming interface [API]) in almost all fields, with one minor exception, and the correlations tended to decrease slightly when student readers were excluded. Readership followed either a lognormal or a hooked power law distribution, whereas citations always followed a hooked power law, showing that the two may have underlying differences.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
More From: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.