Who reads research articles? An altmetrics analysis of Mendeley user categories

Abstract

Little detailed information is known about who reads research articles and the contexts in which research articles are read. Using data about people who register in Mendeley as readers of articles, this paper explores different types of users of Clinical Medicine, Engineering and Technology, Social Science, Physics and Chemistry papers inside and outside academia. The majority of readers for all disciplines were PhD students, postgraduates and postdocs but other types of academics were also represented. In addition, many Clinical Medicine papers were read by medical professionals. The highest correlations between citations and Mendeley readership counts were found for types of users that often authored academic papers, except for associate professors in some subdisciplines. This suggests that Mendeley readership can reflect usage similar to traditional citation impact, if the data is restricted to readers who are also authors, without the delay of impact measured by citation counts. At the same time, Mendeley statistics can also reveal the hidden impact of some research papers, such as educational value for nonauthor users inside academia or the impact of research papers on practice for readers outside academia.

Can alternative indicators overcome language biases in citation counts? A comparison of Spanish and UK research

“…These results are broadly in line with previous studies (e.g., Thelwall and Sud 2015;Mohammadi and Thelwall 2014;Mohammadi et al 2015;Thelwall and Wilson 2016;Zahedi et al 2014). The proportions varied from 91.4% for neurology to 64% for computational mathematics and 63% for language and linguistics.…”

“…This indicator can be broken down by readers' occupations (Mohammadi et al 2015(Mohammadi et al , p. 1844 so that in some cases this metric may reflect traditional impacts and in other cases reflect other types of impacts (Li et al 2012;Mohammadi et al 2015). Mendeley readership counts may be particularly useful in social sciences and engineering areas where there are more Mendeley readers than Scopus citations (Mohammadi et al 2015(Mohammadi et al , p. 1844. They are also useful as early impact indicators because they tend to grow about a year before citations (Thelwall and Sud 2015).…”

“…They are also useful as early impact indicators because they tend to grow about a year before citations (Thelwall and Sud 2015). Nevertheless, Mendeley has a bias towards junior researchers, since most of its users are PhD students, postgraduates and postdocs (Jeng et al 2015;Mohammadi et al 2015) and national biases, since Mendeley users tend to select articles from their own countries (Thelwall and Maflahi 2015).…”

“…Twitter seems to have a social orientation (Costas et al 2015b) and more frequency cites scholarly publications than do other altmetric sources, including academic blogs, Facebook and Google+ (Costas et al 2015a;Haustein et al 2015;Thelwall et al 2013). There is also evidence that a considerable number of Twitter mentions occur shortly after research is published (Eysenbach 2011; Priem and Costello 2010) and they seem to reflect attention, popularity or visibility rather than impact, so that Twitter mentions may be an early indicator of the level of attention (including publicity) that articles attract (Haustein et al 2014).…”

“…Queries were created with the title of the article, the last name of the first author and publication year. DOIs were not used as they are often absent in the Mendeley entries (Mohammadi et al 2015) and there may be a UK/Spain difference in their prevalence. When no matches were found, zero Mendeley readers were assigned to the article.…”