INTRODUCTION Social media based indicators or altmetrics have been under scrutiny for the last seven years. Their promise as alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact (Priem, Piwowar, & Hemminger, 2012) is still far from becoming a reality (Torres-Salinas, Cabezas-Clavijo, & Jiménez-Contreras, 2013). Issues with regard to their meaning (Sud & Thelwall, 2014), potential use as alternati...

Social media is increasingly used in higher education settings by researchers, students and institutions. Whether it is researchers conversing with other researchers, or universities seeking to communicate to a wider audience, social media platforms serve as a tool for users to communicate and increase visibility. Scholarly communication in social media and investigations about social media met...

Today, in addition to citations and with the expansion of social Background: media, the use of altmetrics has gained attention as a tool necessary for evaluating the effects of scientific publications. The present study intended to monitor Iranian pediatrics articles, as one of the leading areas of scientific publications in Iran, between the years 2010-2016 using altmetrics and citation-metric...

Purpose: Whereas citation counts allow the measurement of the impact of research on research itself, an important role in the measurement of the impact of research on other parts of society is ascribed to altmetrics. The present case study investigates the usefulness of altmetrics for measuring the broader impact of research. Methods: This case study is essentially based on a dataset with paper...

Today, in addition to citations and with the expansion of social Background: media, the use of altmetrics has gained attention as a tool necessary for evaluating the effects of scientific publications. The present study intended to monitor Iranian pediatrics articles, as one of the leading areas of scientific publications in Iran, between the years 2010-2016 using altmetrics and citation-metric...

Introduction In the context of “altmetrics”, tweets have been discussed as potential indicators of immediate and broader societal impact of scientific documents (Thelwall et al., 2013a). However, it is not yet clear to what extent Twitter captures actual research impact. A small case study (Thelwall et al., 2013b) suggests that tweets to journal articles neither comment on nor express any senti...

China's scientific output has risen precipitously over the past decade; it is now the world’s second largest producer of scientific papers, behind only the United States. The quality of China’s research is also on the rise (Van Noorden, 2016). The online visibility and impact of China’s research are also important issues worth exploring. In this study, we investigate the altmetric performance o...

Twitter is currently one of the primary venues for online information dissemination. Although its detractors portray it as nothing more than an exercise in narcissism and banality, Twitter is also used to share news stories and other information that may be of interest to a person’s followers. The current study sampled tweeters who had tweeted at least one link to an article in one of four lead...