On the relationships between bibliographic characteristics of scientific documents and citation and Mendeley readership counts: A large-scale analysis of Web of Science publications

Abstract

In this paper we present a first large-scale analysis of the relationship between Mendeley readership and citation counts with particular documents' bibliographic characteristics. A data set of 1.3 million publications from different fields published in journals covered by the Web of Science (WoS) has been analyzed. This work reveals that document types that are often excluded from citation analysis due to their lower citation values, like editorial materials, letters, or news items, are strongly covered and saved in Mendeley, suggesting that Mendeley readership can reliably inform the analysis of these document types. Findings show that collaborative papers are frequently saved in Mendeley, which is similar to what is observed for citations. The relationship between readership and the length of titles and number of pages, however, is weaker than for the same relationship observed for citations. The analysis of different disciplines also points to different patterns in the relationship between several document characteristics, readership, and citation counts. Overall, results highlight that although disciplinary differences exist, readership counts are related to similar bibliographic characteristics as those related to citation counts, reinforcing the idea that Mendeley readership and citations capture a similar concept of impact, although they cannot be considered as equivalent indicators.

What increases (social) media attention: Research impact, author prominence or title attractiveness?

“…This phenomenon was also observed in non-scientific tweets; findings of Ferrara & Yang (2015) suggest that Twitter users are more inclined to share and favorite tweets with positive content. Our other results, with regard to title attractiveness, are in line with findings from (Zahedi & Haustein, 2018;Jacques & Sebire, 2010) who showed that publications that use colon in the title and have shorter titles are more likely to be downloaded from publisher website, to appear in (social) media and to receive citations. In addition, the PNAS publications in which a new person appears as co-author for the first time and holds the last authorship position attract more media attention than publications of scientists who publish frequently in PNAS and collaborate with diverse co-author teams.…”

“…Title attractiveness. Zahedi & Haustein (2018) showed that Mendeley readership counts have a small negative correlation with the title length of paper in most disciplines. Publication titles with punctuation marks (e.g.…”

Social Media Metrics for New Research Evaluation

“…In the bottom-right quadrant in addition to the traditional bibliometrics (e.g. based on Scopus or Web of Science) and peer review, we also find F1000Prime recommendations and Mendeley readerships Mohammadi, et al, 2015;Zahedi, et al, 2014a;Zahedi & Haustein, 2018) both with a reasonably strong scholary focus (both are mostly used by scholars and are about scholary outputs), although they also have some social media focus (e.g. both are user generated and interactions among users and outputs are possible).…”

Bibliometric analysis of Journal of Nursing Management from 1993 to 2018

“…field and reputation of journals, open access) and document values (e.g. clinical value and basic value) (Bornmann, Schier, Marx, & Daniel, 2012;Zahedi & Haustein, 2018).…”