The thematic orientation of publications mentioned on social media. Issue 3 (18th May 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Stefanie Haustein, Dr Cassidy R. Sugimoto and Dr Vincent Larivière, Dr; Costas, Rodrigo; Zahedi, Zohreh; Wouters, Paul
• Is Part Of: Aslib journal of information management. Volume 67:Issue 3(2015:Jun.)
• Page Start: 260
• Page End: 288
• Publication Date: 2015-05-18
• Subjects: Information science -- Periodicals; Library science -- Periodicals; 020.5
• DOI: 10.1108/AJIM-12-2014-0173
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2050-3806

Abstract

<abstract> <title> <x content-type="archive" xml:space="preserve">Abstract</x> </title> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Purpose</title> <p> – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the disciplinary orientation of scientific publications that were mentioned on different social media platforms, focussing on their differences and similarities with citation counts. </p> </sec> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Design/methodology/approach</title> <p> – Social media metrics and readership counts, associated with 500, 216 publications and their citation data from the Web of Science database, were collected from <ext-link ext-link-type="uri">Altmetric.com</ext-link> and Mendeley. Results are presented through descriptive statistical analyses together with science maps generated with VOSviewer. </p> </sec> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Findings</title> <p> – The results confirm Mendeley as the most prevalent social media source with similar characteristics to citations in their distribution across fields and their density in average values per publication. The humanities, natural sciences, and engineering disciplines have a much lower presence of social media metrics. Twitter has a stronger focus on general medicine and social sciences. Other sources (blog, Facebook, Google+, and news media mentions) are more prominent in regards to multidisciplinary journals. </p> </sec> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Originality/value</title> <p> – This paper reinforces the relevance of Mendeley as a social media source for analytical purposes from a disciplinary perspective, being particularly relevant for the social sciences (together with Twitter). Key implications for the use of social media metrics on the evaluation of research performance (e.g. the concentration of some social media metrics, such as blogs, news items, etc., around multidisciplinary journals) are identified.</p> </sec> </abstract>