Do Mendeley Readership Counts Help to Filter Highly Cited WoS Publications better than Average Citation Impact of Journals (JCS)?

In this study, the ‘academic status’ of users of scientific publications in Mendeley is explored in order to analyse the usage pattern of Mendeley users in terms of subject fields, citation and readership impact. The main focus of this study is on studying the filtering capacity of Mendeley readership counts compared to journal citation scores in detecting highly cited WoS publications. Main finding suggests a faster reception of Mendeley readerships as compared to citations across 5 major field of science. The higher correlations of scientific users with citations indicate the similarity between reading and citation behaviour among these users. It is confirmed that Mendeley readership counts filter highly cited publications (PPtop 10%) better than journal citation scores in all subject fields and by most of user types. This result reinforces the potential role that Mendeley readerships could play for informing scientific and alternative impacts. Conference Topic Altmetrics Introduction Mendeley is a popular reference management tool and a rich source of readership metrics for scholarly outputs, used by more than 2.5 million users. This platform collects a wide variety of different metadata for each publication saved by the different types of users in their individual library. Among these metadata, statistics about ‘academic status’, ‘discipline’ and ‘country’ provide useful information on the typologies of users of scientific publications in Mendeley. Mendeley has different coverage and presence across different fields of science (Zahedi, Costas & Wouters, 2014). A moderate correlation between Mendeley readership and citation counts has been observed for different sets of publications from different fields showing that Mendeley readership counts reflect similar but (perhaps) also other types of impact (Thelwall et al., 2013; Haustein et al., 2013; Zahedi, Costas & Wouters, 2014; Mohammadi & Thelwall, 2014). Also, a weak correlation among number of authors, departments, institutions and countries and readership and citation counts for WoS publications has been observed (Sud & Thelwall, in press; Thelwall & Maflahi, in press). Research on users showed that the majority of Mendeley users per publication are PhDs and students. However, one important limitation with Mendeley data on the analysis of users was the data restriction caused by the reporting of only the three most common user types per publication. Full data on users are necessary in 1. This paper presented at the 15 International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI), 29 Jun4 July, 2015, Bogazici University, Istanbul (Turkey) 2 . http://blog.mendeley.com/start-up-life/mendeley-has-2-5-million-users/ 3. See: http://apidocs.mendeley.com/home/user-specific-methods/user-library-document-details