Posted, visited, exported: Altmetrics in the social tagging system BibSonomy

Abstract

In social tagging systems, like Mendeley, CiteULike, and BibSonomy, users can post, tag, visit, or export scholarly publications. In this paper, we compare citations with metrics derived from users' activities (altmetrics) in the popular social bookmarking system BibSonomy. Our analysis, using a corpus of more than 250,000 publications published before 2010, reveals that overall, citations and altmetrics in BibSonomy are mildly correlated. Furthermore, grouping publications by user-generated tags results in topic-homogeneous subsets that exhibit higher correlations with citations than the full corpus. We find that posts, exports, and visits of publications are correlated with citations and even bear predictive power over future impact. Machine learning classifiers predict whether the number of citations that a publication receives in a year exceeds the median number of citations in that year, based on the usage counts of the preceding year. In that setup, a Random Forest predictor outperforms the baseline on average by seven percentage points.

Differences between journals and years in the proportions of students, researchers and faculty registering Mendeley articles

“…Given the wide differences within chemistry and physics, it seems likely that relatively narrow specialisms have their own citation and resource sharing cultures that sometimes exclude Mendeley (Thelwall, 2017c), perhaps because other reference sharing sites are used instead (Lee, & Schleyer, 2012;Zoller, Doerfel, Jäschke, Stumme, & Hotho, 2016). The low adoption of Mendeley by astrophysicists has previously been noted (Bar-Ilan, 2014).…”

30. Scholarly communication in social media

“…They were soon also taken up by users who wanted to share and keep track of scholarly literature on the Web, which lead to specialized bookmarking systems for this type of resources and turned platforms into social reference managers. Platforms like Bibsonomy (Zoller et al, 2016) or Zotero include functionalities such as, for example, directly importing bibliographic metadata via identifiers (e.g., DOI or ISBN numbers). Moreover, Academia.edu, ResearchGate and Mendeley have used functionalities of social networking platforms and combined them with bookmarking principles in order to attract an academic user community.…”

Do Mendeley reader counts indicate the value of arts and humanities research?

“…Moreover, the relatively early year of the articles selected for analysis, 2008, further undermines the correlation test for Mendeley because more recent articles are more likely to be registered in the site (Thelwall & Sud, 2016) and even recently published articles may have Mendeley readers (Maflahi, & Thelwall, 2016). There are other reference managers, such as Bibsonomy (Borrego & Fry, 2012;Zoller, Doerfel, Jäschke, Stumme, & Hotho, 2016), but these are substantially less used or do not publish their reader count data.…”