Examining the Association between Citations and Altmetric Indicators of LIS Articles indexed in Dimensions Database

Abstract

Social media attention to scholarly articles has become a novel measure for assessing the broader impact of research, which complements the traditional citation metrics. This article examined the correlation between citations with major altmetric indicators for 1951 LIS articles published in 2020. Altmetric Explorer was used for collecting the data, and analysis was done using Excel and SPSS. The result showed that LIS articles were well engaged on social media platforms gaining more societal attention than their scientific reference in terms of citations. Mendeley (69.40%) and Twitter (28.72%) were the top intakes of LIS articles, and Pinterest (0.001%) and F1000 (0.001%) were the least ones. The users from the USA were the major Twitterati for the LIS articles, with average Tweeters of -0.58 across the globe. The users from the UK were the top mentioner of the articles on Facebook (2.7%), while the USA was on the News and mainstream media (55.6%). Except for Peer review (r= -0.05), all other altimetric indicators were positively associated with Dimensions citations. The study's findings allow the authors to analyze the societal impact of their scholarship through altmetric indicators and use altmetric indicators as supplementary to the citation metrics for measuring the immediate impact of the LIS scientific outputs.

Keywords

• library and information science
• traditional metrics
• altmetrics
• correlation