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Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services

Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have...

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Autores principales: Thelwall, Mike, Haustein, Stefanie, Larivière, Vincent, Sugimoto, Cassidy R.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3665624/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23724101
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064841
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author Thelwall, Mike
Haustein, Stefanie
Larivière, Vincent
Sugimoto, Cassidy R.
author_facet Thelwall, Mike
Haustein, Stefanie
Larivière, Vincent
Sugimoto, Cassidy R.
author_sort Thelwall, Mike
collection PubMed
description Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have reported medium correlations between specific altmetrics and citation rates for individual journals or fields. To fill this gap, this study compares 11 altmetrics with Web of Science citations for 76 to 208,739 PubMed articles with at least one altmetric mention in each case and up to 1,891 journals per metric. It also introduces a simple sign test to overcome biases caused by different citation and usage windows. Statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and higher citations for articles with positive altmetric scores in all cases with sufficient evidence (Twitter, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blogs, mainstream media and forums) except perhaps for Google+ posts. Evidence was insufficient for LinkedIn, Pinterest, question and answer sites, and Reddit, and no conclusions should be drawn about articles with zero altmetric scores or the strength of any correlation between altmetrics and citations. Nevertheless, comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles. Finally, the coverage of all the altmetrics except for Twitter seems to be low and so it is not clear if they are prevalent enough to be useful in practice.
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spelling pubmed-36656242013-05-30 Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services Thelwall, Mike Haustein, Stefanie Larivière, Vincent Sugimoto, Cassidy R. PLoS One Research Article Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have reported medium correlations between specific altmetrics and citation rates for individual journals or fields. To fill this gap, this study compares 11 altmetrics with Web of Science citations for 76 to 208,739 PubMed articles with at least one altmetric mention in each case and up to 1,891 journals per metric. It also introduces a simple sign test to overcome biases caused by different citation and usage windows. Statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and higher citations for articles with positive altmetric scores in all cases with sufficient evidence (Twitter, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blogs, mainstream media and forums) except perhaps for Google+ posts. Evidence was insufficient for LinkedIn, Pinterest, question and answer sites, and Reddit, and no conclusions should be drawn about articles with zero altmetric scores or the strength of any correlation between altmetrics and citations. Nevertheless, comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles. Finally, the coverage of all the altmetrics except for Twitter seems to be low and so it is not clear if they are prevalent enough to be useful in practice. Public Library of Science 2013-05-28 /pmc/articles/PMC3665624/ /pubmed/23724101 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064841 Text en © 2013 Thelwall et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Thelwall, Mike
Haustein, Stefanie
Larivière, Vincent
Sugimoto, Cassidy R.
Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services
title Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services
title_full Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services
title_fullStr Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services
title_full_unstemmed Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services
title_short Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services
title_sort do altmetrics work? twitter and ten other social web services
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3665624/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23724101
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064841
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