The Presence of Iranian Information Science and Library Science Articles in Social Media: An Altmetric Study

Abstract

Objective: The main objective of the paper is to study the presence of Iranian Information Science & Library Science articles in social media websites and tools. Articles with the highest altmetric scores will be identified and the association between altmetric and citation indicators will be investigated. Methodology: This study is an applied research using altmetric data. A total of 563 articles in the area of Information Science & Library Science which specified Iran as their affiliated country and indexed by the Thomson Reuters until the end of 2014, were selected as the population of study. The altmetric bookmarklet, a service provided by Altmetric Institute was used for data collection. Statistical analysis and visualization was conducted using R statistical computing software. Results: Out of 563 Iranian IS & LS articles, 72 papers (12.8%) were mentioned at least once in different social media. Twitter (80.55%) stands out as the most promising altmetric source for Iranian IS & LS papers, followed by Mendeley (77.77%) and CiteULike (22.22%). Studying the share of IS & LS papers with altmetric indicators across publication years show that papers published in 2014 have the highest proportion (30%). The results of running a Spearman correlation test revealed statistically significant but moderate relationships between Mendeley and CiteULike readership counts and number of citations in Web of Science. Conclusion: Altmetric indicators, indices based on activity in social media environments, have the potential to measure scientific impact of researchers beside other scientometric indicators.

Keywords

• Altmetrics
• Article-level Metrics
• Social Media
• Information Science &
• Library Science.