Department

Public Services

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2020

Abstract

Citation count is a quantitative method of measuring the impact of a research work. A higher citation count may indicate that the research work receives more attention among peers which could mean that the research contributes value to that discipline of literature. Citation count sums the number of times that an article is referenced by other authors. Tracking citations is important; however, the citation impact only tells a part of the story from academic researchers who conduct and publish research works. The impact of the publication on leisure readers and non-publishing readers are ignored. Furthermore, it is difficult to set a standard impact measurement across disciplines. Research showed that articles in the hard sciences (e.g. chemistry, biology) tends to gain more citations than in soft sciences (e.g. social science, psychology) (Harzing, 2010; Nederhof, 2006). Even in the same field, articles that focus on praxis often receive less citation count than those that focus on theories. However, articles that focus on practice are valuable, and should be a part of the academic landscape (Akers, 2017). Finally, measuring the value of a newly published article with citation count can be difficult, since citations grow gradually over the years. The emergence of electronic publications and web technology allows people to view a research output by the amount of attention it receives. Web-based tools such as F1000, PLos, Altmetric, Plum Analytics, CiteULike, and Mendeley collect a publication’s output through a variety of online sources. These usage statistics such as number of views, downloads, mentions, etc., disclose the popularity or influence of a publication to some degree (Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2014). Mendeley readership — a feature of Mendeley Web powered by Scopus —allows researchers to monitor the impact as well as the usage of their scholarly work (Bonasio, 2014). Altmetric attention score (AAS) generates a research impact score by weighting the attention that an article receives from social media, blogs, news, and other online sources. AAS presents a quick, UNWRAP CITATIONS, ALTMETRIC SCORE, AND MENDELEY READERSHIP STATUS 3 multifaceted way to demonstrate the value of a research that is arguable more robust than citation count (Huang, Wang, & Wu, 2018). Since works in the arts and humanities typically do not receive as many citations as other disciplines, the traditional bibliometric may not be a good indicator of research impact — AAS is more considerable in fields that measure researcher and reader behaviors like searching, reading, and sharing (Cho, 2017). As an increasing amount scholars and researchers in academic disciplines create their online research profile on academic network (e.g. Academia, ResearchGate, Linkedln, Mendeley) or share their research via social media, the online attention has become a valuable aspect and a non-delay algorism to measure research impacts (Aharony et al., 2019; Garcovich, Ausina Marquez, & Adobes Martin, 2019).

Publication/Presentation Information

Tang, Y., Tseng, H. and Vann, C.P. (July 2020) "Unwrap Citation, Altmetric, and Mendeley Status of Highly Cited Articles in the Top-tier Library and Information Science Journals." Global Knowledge Memory and Communication. DOI: 10.1108/GKMC-01-2020-0005

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