Mendeley Readers Research Articles

Does Female-authored Research have More Educational Impact than Male-authored Research? Evidence from Mendeley

Female academics are more likely to be in teaching-related roles in some countries, including the USA. As a side effect of this, female-authored journal articles may tend to be more useful for students. This study assesses this hypothesis by investigating whether female first-authored research has more uptake in education than male first-authored research. Based on an analysis of Mendeley readers of articles from 2014 in five countries and 100 narrow Scopus subject categories, the results show that female-authored articles attract more student readers than male-authored articles in Spain, Turkey, the UK and USA but not India. They also attract fewer professorial readers in Spain, the UK and the USA, but not India and Turkey, and tend to be less popular with senior academics. Because the results are based on analysis of differences within narrow fields they cannot be accounted for by females working in more education-related disciplines. The apparent additional educational impact for female-authored research could be due to selecting more accessible micro-specialisms, however, such as health-related instruments within the instrumentation narrow field. Whatever the cause, the results suggest that citation-based research evaluations may undervalue the wider impact of female researchers.

Do females create higher impact research? Scopus citations and Mendeley readers for articles from five countries

Abstract There are known gender imbalances in participation in scientific fields, from female dominance of nursing to male dominance of mathematics. It is not clear whether there is also a citation imbalance, with some claiming that male-authored research tends to be more cited. No previous study has assessed gender differences in the readers of academic research on a large scale, however. In response, this article assesses whether there are gender differences in the average citations and/or Mendeley readers of academic publications. Field normalised logged Scopus citations and Mendeley readers from mid-2018 for articles published in 2014 were investigated for articles with first authors from India, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the USA in up to 251 fields with at least 50 male and female authors. Although female-authored research is less cited in Turkey (−4.0%) and India (−3.6%), it is marginally more cited in Spain (0.4%), the UK (0.4%), and the USA (0.2%). Female-authored research has fewer Mendeley readers in India (−1.1%) but more in Spain (1.4%), Turkey (1.1%), the UK (2.7%) and the USA (3.0%). Thus, whilst there may be little practical gender difference in citation impact in countries with mature science systems, the higher female readership impact suggests a wider audience for female-authored research. The results also show that the conclusions from a gender analysis depend on the field normalisation method. A theoretically informed decision must therefore be made about which normalisation to use. The results also suggest that arithmetic mean-based field normalisation is favourable to males.

Reliability and accuracy of altmetric providers: a comparison among Altmetric.com, PlumX and Crossref Event Data

The aim of this study is to measure differences between three relevant altmetric providers: Altmetric.com, PlumX and Crossref Event Data (CED). More than 67,000 research papers, initially extracted from PlumX, were searched in Altmetric.com and CED to compare their counts. Differences between services were analyzed regarding the number of documents with an altmetric event and the counting differences in each metric. Results show that Altmetric.com is the provider with the best coverage of blog posts, news and tweets; while PlumX better collects Mendeley readers; and CED is the site that extracts more Wikipedia citations. The study concludes that there are important counting differences due to technical errors and extracting criteria. The article recommends the use of specific services for the analysis of particular metrics. While, it should be mandatory to employ the combination of several providers, if we want to perform an overall analysis.

Does research using qualitative methods (grounded theory, ethnography, and phenomenology) have more impact?

In spite of the increasing use of qualitative research methods in library and information studies, it is unclear whether using qualitative methods (grounded theory, ethnography, and phenomenology) results in an above average impact in library and information science (LIS). Articles using any of the three qualitative methods published from 2003 to 2013 and indexed in Web of Science in the category of “Information Science & Library Science” (N = 299) were studied. The number of citations and Mendeley readers for each article was compared to the other articles published in the same journal and same volume using mean normalised rank (rank-1/articles-1). The results showed no statistically significant difference between the citation rates of qualitative articles with those of other articles. Qualitative articles on average had a smaller Mendeley readership than the other articles did and the difference was statistically significant. Given the increasing interest in qualitative methods, it is suggested that LIS schools in their education programs and journals in their editorial policies should put more emphasis on issues related to the rigour of qualitative research.

Relationships between abstract features and methodological quality explained variations of social media activity derived from systematic reviews about psoriasis interventions

ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to describe the relationship among abstract structure, readability, and completeness, and how these features may influence social media activity and bibliometric results, considering systematic reviews (SRs) about interventions in psoriasis classified by methodological quality. Study Design and SettingSystematic literature searches about psoriasis interventions were undertaken on relevant databases. For each review, methodological quality was evaluated using the assessing the methodological quality of systematic reviews tool. Abstract extension, structure, readability, and quality and completeness of reporting were analyzed. Social media activity, which consider Twitter and Facebook mention counts, as well as Mendeley readers and Google scholar citations were obtained for each article. Analyses were conducted to describe any potential influence of abstract characteristics on review's social media diffusion. ResultsWe classified 139 intervention SRs as displaying high/moderate/low methodological quality. We observed that abstract readability of SRs has been maintained high for last 20 years, although there are some differences based on their methodological quality. Free format abstracts were most sensitive to the increase of text readability as compared with more structured abstracts (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion or eight headings), yielding opposite effects on their quality and completeness depending on the methodological quality: a worsening in low quality reviews and an improvement in those of high quality. Both readability indices and preferred reporting items of systematic reviews and meta-analyses for Abstract total scores showed an inverse relationship with social media activity and bibliometric results in high methodological quality reviews but not in those of lower quality. ConclusionOur results suggest that increasing abstract readability must be specially considered when writing free format summaries of high-quality reviews because this fact correlates with an improvement of their completeness and quality, and this may help to achieve broader social media visibility and article usage.

Early Mendeley readers correlate with later citation counts

Counts of the number of readers registered in the social reference manager Mendeley have been proposed as an early impact indicator for journal articles. Although previous research has shown that Mendeley reader counts for articles tend to have a strong positive correlation with synchronous citation counts after a few years, no previous studies have compared early Mendeley reader counts with later citation counts. In response, this first diachronic analysis compares reader counts within a month of publication with citation counts after 20 months for ten fields. There are moderate or strong correlations in eight out of ten fields, with the two exceptions being the smallest categories (n = 18, 36) with wide confidence intervals. The correlations are higher than the correlations between later citations and early citations, showing that Mendeley reader counts are more useful early impact indicators than citation counts.

On the differences between citations and altmetrics: An investigation of factors driving altmetrics versus citations for finnish articles

This study examines a range of factors associated with future citation and altmetric counts to a paper. The factors include journal impact factor, individual collaboration, international collaboration, institution prestige, country prestige, research funding, abstract readability, abstract length, title length, number of cited references, field size, and field type and will be modeled in association with citation counts, Mendeley readers, Twitter posts, Facebook posts, blog posts, and news posts. The results demonstrate that eight factors are important for increased citation counts, seven different factors are important for increased Mendeley readers, eight factors are important for increased Twitter posts, three factors are important for increased Facebook posts, six factors are important for increased blog posts, and five factors are important for increased news posts. Journal impact factor and international collaboration are the two factors that significantly associate with increased citation counts and with all altmetric scores. Moreover, it seems that the factors driving Mendeley readership are similar to those driving citation counts. However, the altmetric events differ from each other in terms of a small number of factors; for instance, institution prestige and country prestige associate with increased Mendeley readers and blog and news posts, but it is an insignificant factor for Twitter and Facebook posts. The findings contribute to the continued development of theoretical models and methodological developments associated with capturing, interpreting, and understanding altmetric events.

Gender differences in scientific productivity and visibility in core neurosurgery journals: Citations and social media metrics

Social media has provided new opportunities for both female and male academics to disseminate their research results, and presence on the Internet is found to increase the visibility of scholars. Thus, this study examined whether there were differences in terms of scientific productivity or the visibility (both in terms of citations and social media metrics) of female and male scholars in the field of neurosurgery. To do this, 11,127 articles and reviews from 2012 to 2014 were extracted from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database. This accounted for 14,944 unique authors. To study the visibility of neurosurgery scholars in terms of social media metrics, the following altmetric indicators were used: Mendeley readers, the post count of news, tweets, blogs, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The methodology and procedures employed included descriptive statistics, chi-square test, two-sample proportion test, and analysis of covariance. The results demonstrated that the number of female scholars was significantly lower compared to their male counterparts. Additionally, female neurosurgery scientists were found to be slightly less prolific in terms of scientific productivity. However, women were slightly more visible with regard to citations, readership, and tweets. Finally, both genders were similarly successful in terms of receivingmentions from blogs, news, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Differences between journals and years in the proportions of students, researchers and faculty registering Mendeley articles

This article contains two investigations into Mendeley reader counts with the same dataset. Mendeley reader counts provide evidence of early scholarly impact for journal articles, but reflect the reading of a relatively young subset of all researchers. To investigate whether this age bias is constant or varies by narrow field and publication year, this article compares the proportions of student, researcher and faculty readers for articles published 1996–2016 in 36 large monodisciplinary journals. In these journals, undergraduates recorded the newest research and faculty the oldest, with large differences between journals. The existence of substantial differences in the composition of readers between related fields points to the need for caution when using Mendeley readers as substitutes for citations for broad fields. The second investigation shows, with the same data, that there are substantial differences between narrow fields in the time taken for Scopus citations to be as numerous as Mendeley readers. Thus, even narrow field differences can impact on the relative value of Mendeley compared to citation counts.

Cross-metric compatability and inconsistencies of altmetrics

Metrics like the number of tweets or Mendeley readers are currently discussed as an alternative to evaluate research. These alternative metrics (altmetrics) still need to be evaluated in order to fully understand their meaning, their benefits and limitations. While several preceding studies concentrate on correlations of altmetrics with classical measures like citations, this study aims at investigating metric-compatibility within altmetrics. For this purpose, 5000 journal articles from six disciplines have been analyzed regarding their metrics with the help of the aggregators PlumX and Altmetric.com. For this set, the highest numbers of events have been recognized regarding Mendeley readers, followed by Twitter and Facebook mentions. Thereby variations considering the aggregators could be observed. Intra-correlations between the metrics across one aggregator have been calculated, as well as inter-correlations for the corresponding metrics across the aggregators. For both aggregators, low to medium intra-correlations could be calculated which shows the diversity of the different metrics. Regarding inter-correlations, PlumX and Altmetric.com are highly consistent concerning Mendeley readers ( $$r=0.97$$ ) and Wikipedia mentions ( $$r=0.82$$ ), whereas the consistency concerning Twitter ( $$r=0.49$$ ), blogs ( $$r=0.46$$ ) and Reddit ( $$r=0.41$$ ) is on a moderate level. The sources Facebook ( $$r=0.29$$ ), Google+ ( $$r=0.28$$ ) and News ( $$r=0.11$$ ) show only low correlations.

The differential impact of scientific quality, bibliometric factors, and social media activity on the influence of systematic reviews and meta-analyses about psoriasis.

Researchers are increasingly using on line social networks to promote their work. Some authors have suggested that measuring social media activity can predict the impact of a primary study (i.e., whether or not an article will be highly cited). However, the influence of variables such as scientific quality, research disclosures, and journal characteristics on systematic reviews and meta-analyses has not yet been assessed. The present study aims to describe the effect of complex interactions between bibliometric factors and social media activity on the impact of systematic reviews and meta-analyses about psoriasis (PROSPERO 2016: CRD42016053181). Methodological quality was assessed using the Assessing the Methodological Quality of Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) tool. Altmetrics, which consider Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ mention counts as well as Mendeley and SCOPUS readers, and corresponding article citation counts from Google Scholar were obtained for each article. Metadata and journal-related bibliometric indices were also obtained. One-hundred and sixty-four reviews with available altmetrics information were included in the final multifactorial analysis, which showed that social media and impact factor have less effect than Mendeley and SCOPUS readers on the number of cites that appear in Google Scholar. Although a journal’s impact factor predicted the number of tweets (OR, 1.202; 95% CI, 1.087–1.049), the years of publication and the number of Mendeley readers predicted the number of citations in Google Scholar (OR, 1.033; 95% CI, 1.018–1.329). Finally, methodological quality was related neither with bibliometric influence nor social media activity for systematic reviews. In conclusion, there seems to be a lack of connectivity between scientific quality, social media activity, and article usage, thus predicting scientific success based on these variables may be inappropriate in the particular case of systematic reviews.

A study on factors related to readership of scientific articles

This paper analyzes the relationship between the number of Twitter and Mendeley readers with the article’s subject, publisher, journal, and title length. It also looks at which country has the greatest number of readers to see if researchers can garner more visibility by publishing an article relevant to issues in those countries. The purpose of this report is to help researchers improve the visibility and impact value of their research. The data was gathered from 550,000 scientific research papers published between January 1st and July 1st of 2016. Python’s built-in JSON library was used to extract the number of Twitter and Mendeley readers, as well as the article count for each factor. The correlation between readers per article and each factor was then visualized using bubble graphs, linear regression models, and scatter plots. This paper concludes that the length of the title is the strongest factor affecting readership. In particular, titles with lengths between 51 and 90 characters have the greatest number of readers. Moreover, articles relevant to issues in countries with a higher GDP have the highest overall readership. On the other hand, the publisher and the journal did not have a significant effect on readership, while the subject of the article had a moderate effect on readership.

A decade of Garfield readers

This brief note discusses Garfield's continuing influence from the perspective of the Mendeley readers of his articles. This reflects the direct impact of his work since the launch of Mendeley in August 2008. In the last decade, his work is still extensively read by younger scientists, especially in computer and information sciences and the social sciences, and with a broad international spread. His work on citation indexes, impact factors and science history tracking seems to have the most contemporary relevance.

Microsoft Academic: A multidisciplinary comparison of citation counts with Scopus and Mendeley for 29 journals

Microsoft Academic is a free citation index that allows large scale data collection. This combination makes it useful for scientometric research. Previous studies have found that its citation counts tend to be slightly larger than those of Scopus but smaller than Google Scholar, with disciplinary variations. This study reports the largest and most systematic analysis so far, of 172,752 articles in 29 large journals chosen from different specialisms. From Scopus citation counts, Microsoft Academic citation counts and Mendeley reader counts for articles published 2007-2017, Microsoft Academic found a slightly more (6%) citations than Scopus overall and especially for the current year (51%). It found fewer citations than Mendeley readers overall (59%), and only 7% as many for the current year. Differences between journals were probably due to field preprint sharing cultures or journal policies rather than broad disciplinary differences.

How quickly do publications get read? The evolution of mendeley reader counts for new articles

Within science, citation counts are widely used to estimate research impact but publication delays mean that they are not useful for recent research. This gap can be filled by Mendeley reader counts, which are valuable early impact indicators for academic articles because they appear before citations and correlate strongly with them. Nevertheless, it is not known how Mendeley readership counts accumulate within the year of publication, and so it is unclear how soon they can be used. In response, this paper reports a longitudinal weekly study of the Mendeley readers of articles in 6 library and information science journals from 2016. The results suggest that Mendeley readers accrue from when articles are first available online and continue to steadily build. For journals with large publication delays, articles can already have substantial numbers of readers by their publication date. Thus, Mendeley reader counts may even be useful as early impact indicators for articles before they have been officially published in a journal issue. If field normalized indicators are needed, then these can be generated when journal issues are published using the online first date.

Do Mendeley reader counts reflect the scholarly impact of conference papers? An investigation of computer science and engineering

Counts of Mendeley readers may give useful evidence about the impact of published research. Although previous studies have found significant positive correlations between counts of Mendeley readers and citation counts for journal articles, it is not known if this is equally true for conference papers. To fill this gap, Mendeley readership data and Scopus citation counts were extracted for both journal articles and conference papers published in 2011 in four fields for which conferences are important: Computer Science Applications; Computer Software; Building and Construction Engineering; and Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering. Mendeley readership counts correlated moderately with citation counts for both journal articles and conference papers in Computer Science Applications and Computer Software. The correlations were much lower between Mendeley readers and citation counts for conference papers than for journal articles in Building & Construction Engineering and Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering. Hence, there seem to be disciplinary differences in the usefulness of Mendeley readership counts as impact indicators for conference papers, even between fields for which conferences are important.

Are Mendeley reader counts high enough for research evaluations when articles are published?

PurposeMendeley reader counts have been proposed as early indicators for the impact of academic publications. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether there are enough Mendeley readers for research evaluation purposes during the month when an article is first published.Design/methodology/approachAverage Mendeley reader counts were compared to the average Scopus citation counts for 104,520 articles from ten disciplines during the second half of 2016.FindingsArticles attracted, on average, between 0.1 and 0.8 Mendeley readers per article in the month in which they first appeared in Scopus. This is about ten times more than the average Scopus citation count.Research limitations/implicationsOther disciplines may use Mendeley more or less than the ten investigated here. The results are dependent on Scopus’s indexing practices, and Mendeley reader counts can be manipulated and have national and seniority biases.Practical implicationsMendeley reader counts during the month of publication are more powerful than Scopus citations for comparing the average impacts of groups of documents but are not high enough to differentiate between the impacts of typical individual articles.Originality/valueThis is the first multi-disciplinary and systematic analysis of Mendeley reader counts from the publication month of an article.

Three practical field normalised alternative indicator formulae for research evaluation

Although altmetrics and other web-based alternative indicators are now commonplace in publishers' websites, they can be difficult for research evaluators to use because of the time or expense of the data, the need to benchmark in order to assess their values, the high proportion of zeros in some alternative indicators, and the time taken to calculate multiple complex indicators. These problems are addressed here by (a) a field normalisation formula, the Mean Normalised Log-transformed Citation Score (MNLCS) that allows simple confidence limits to be calculated and is similar to a proposal of Lundberg, (b) field normalisation formulae for the proportion of cited articles in a set, the Equalised Mean-based Normalised Proportion Cited (EMNPC) and the Mean-based Normalised Proportion Cited (MNPC), to deal with mostly uncited data sets, (c) a sampling strategy to minimise data collection costs, and (d) free unified software to gather the raw data, implement the sampling strategy, and calculate the indicator formulae and confidence limits. The approach is demonstrated (but not fully tested) by comparing the Scopus citations, Mendeley readers and Wikipedia mentions of research funded by Wellcome, NIH, and MRC in three large fields for 2013-2016. Within the results, statistically significant differences in both citation counts and Mendeley reader counts were found even for sets of articles that were less than six months old. Mendeley reader counts were more precise than Scopus citations for the most recent articles and all three funders could be demonstrated to have an impact in Wikipedia that was significantly above the world average.

Comparing Downloads, Mendeley Readership and Google Scholar Citations as Indicators of Article Performance

AbstractThis single journal article level indicator study investigated the relationship between download usage statistics, Mendeley readership scores and Google Scholar citation counts. The 378 articles published in the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries (EJISDC) in the 14‐year period 2000 to 2013 were examined. Results showed that all 378 articles were downloaded and had Mendeley readers. Of the 378 articles, 359 (94.97%) articles received Google Scholar citations and 19 (5.03%) articles received no citations. For the 359 cited articles, the average Google Scholar citations per article were 28.82. The average EJISDC downloads were 7440.69, the average Mendeley readership was 19.30 and Google Scholar citations were 27.36. The most influential articles in the EJISDC were identified by ranking and by comparing the top 20 articles by downloads, Mendeley readership and Google Scholar citations. The leading authors were identified using the top 20 ranking and comparing it to the most productive authors. For this journal, the results seem to indicate that the highest correlations (Spearman correlation coefficient) were between Google Scholar citations and downloads, a slightly lower correlation between Google Scholar citations and Mendeley readership, and the lowest correlation was between downloads and Mendeley readership.

Can alternative indicators overcome language biases in citation counts? A comparison of Spanish and UK research

This study compares Spanish and UK research in eight subject fields using a range of bibliometric and social media indicators. For each field, lists of Spanish and UK journal articles published in the year 2012 and their citation counts were extracted from Scopus. The software Webometric Analyst was then used to extract a range of altmetrics for these articles, including patent citations, online presentation mentions, online course syllabus mentions, Wikipedia mentions and Mendeley reader counts and Altmetric.com was used to extract Twitter mentions. Results show that Mendeley is the altmetric source with the highest coverage, with 80 % of sampled articles having one or more Mendeley readers, followed by Twitter (34 %). The coverage of the remaining sources was lower than 3 %. All of the indicators checked either have too little data or increase the overall difference between Spain and the UK and so none can be suggested as alternatives to reduce the bias against Spain in traditional citation indexes.