Abstract
China's scientific output has risen precipitously over the past decade; it is now the world's second-largest producer of scientific papers, behind only the United States. The quality of China's research is also on the rise (Van Noorden, 2016). The online visibility and impact of China's research are also important issues worth exploring. In this study, we investigate the altmetric performance of publications in the field of Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology and published by authors from Chinese affiliations. We find that papers published by those authors from Chinese affiliations have much lower visibility on the social web than articles from other countries, when there is no significant difference for the citations. Fewer of China's publications get tweeted, and those tweeted publications attract less social attention. A geographical analysis of tweeters shows that scholarly articles get most of their social attention from the authors' home countries, a finding that is also confirmed by correlation and regression analysis. This situation, which is unfavorable for researchers from Chinese affiliations, is caused, in part, by the inaccessibility of mainstream social networking platforms in mainland China.
Highlights
The prominence of social media has contributed to increased accessibility of scientific information to the public and to increased academic communication among researchers (Virginia et al, 2011; Hurd, 2013)
Mainland China was chosen as a specific research object because in mainland China, international mainstream social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, are unavailable
Neither Chinese researchers nor the Chinese public can participate in the mainstream social web that altmetrics track
Summary
The prominence of social media has contributed to increased accessibility of scientific information to the public and to increased academic communication among researchers (Virginia et al, 2011; Hurd, 2013). Through the mainstream international social web, on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, scholarly articles are widely shared and discussed by people all over the world – except for a few countries and regions. It is the world’s second-largest producer of scientific papers, mainland China is one of these countries that lie outside the mainstream international social web. China’s two biggest native social media platforms, Sina Weibo and WeChat, meet the public’s requirements for information, and Chinese Internet
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