Abstract
Online media and especially social media are becoming more and more relevant to our everyday life. Reflecting this tendency in the scientific community, alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact on the web are increasingly proposed, extending (or even replacing) traditional metrics (e.g., citations, journal impact factor, etc.). This paper explores the relationship between traditional metrics and alternative metrics for psychological research in the years from 2010 to 2012. Traditional publication metrics (e.g., number of citations, impact factor) and alternative metrics (collected from Altmetric, a website that collects and counts references as they appear in Wikipedia, public policy documents, research blogs, mainstream media, or social networks) were extracted and compared, using a dataset of over 245,000 publications from the Web of Science. Results show positive, small to medium, correlations on the level of individual publications, and frequently medium to high correlations on the level of research fields of Psychology. The more accumulated the level of analysis, the higher the correlations. These findings are fairly robust over time and comparable to findings from research areas other than Psychology. Additionally, a new metric, the Score Factor, is proposed as a useful alternative metric to assess a journal’s impact in the online media.
Highlights
Ever since the dawn of the Information Age (Castells 1999), data are collected and spread rapidly online
This paper explores the relationship between traditional metrics and alternative metrics for psychological research in the years from 2010 to 2012
Note that many papers from Clinical Psychology were classified as Clinical Medicine, rendering this by far the most voluminous field (81,762 papers, i.e., 40.4%), considerably larger than Psychology and Cognitive Sciences (46,189 papers, i.e., 22.8%), which was the second ranked field in terms of the number of papers published
Summary
Ever since the dawn of the Information Age (Castells 1999), data are collected and spread rapidly online. Because more or less every researcher nowadays is searching for scientific information on the internet, standard databases like PubMed, and online media have gained enormous impact on dissemination of scientific work (Brossard and Scheufele 2013) This development opens up a new approach of measuring scientific influence and puts traditional measures of scholarly success into question. Lotka’s law was an approximation for the data he had at hand in 1926 It is still more off in describing publication productivity in more recent years (Coile 1977). It is in need of adjustment (Nath and Jackson 1991), but it still informs thinking about the measurement of scientific productivity. It implies that it is a small percentage of researchers who are responsible for the lion’s share of the work. Dennis (1954) surveyed about 80 years of research in psychology and found that the top 10% produced about 50% of the publications, and the less productive half contributed 15% or less
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