Citing Journal Articles in Social Sciences Blogs

Abstract

This article aims to analyze motivations behind social sciences blog posts citing journal articles in order to find out whether blog citations of scholarly journal articles are good indicators for the societal impact of research. A random sample of 300 social sciences blog posts (out of 1,233 blog posts) from ResearchBlogging published between 01/01/2012 to 18/06/2014 were subjected to content analysis. An existing categorization scheme was used and modified inductively. The 300 blog posts had 472 references including 424 journal articles from 269 different journals. Sixty-one (22.68%) of all journals cited were from the category of social sciences and most of the journals with high frequency were highly cited general science journals such as PNAS and Science. Seventy-five percent of all journals were referenced only once. The average age of articles cited was 5.8 years. The most frequent (38, 12.67%) motivation was to ‘neutrally presenting details of a study’. Overall, social science blogs were rather subject-oriented than article oriented. This means a considerable number of blog posts were not driven simply by writing about an article, instead bloggers tend to write about their subject of interest and use references to support their argument. The study shows the potential of blog citations as an altmetric measure and as a proxy for assessing the research impact.

Keywords

• blog citations
• altmetrics
• research
• societal impact
• weblogs
• articles