Disentangling the meaning of ‘altmetrics’: content analysis of Web of Science scientific publications

Rodrigo Costas, Zohreh Zahedi & Paul WoutersCenter for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS-Leiden University)

23 June 2014

Introduction

• Altmetrics: new way of expanding the analysis of ‘impact’ of scientific products• Weak correlations with citations have been

observed (Haustein et al, 2014; Costas et al, 2014)• If they don’t capture the same concept of

impact as citations, then, • What kind of impact do altmetrics capture?• Content analysis of publications with altmetrics

(vs. publications with citation impact)

Research questions• Two main research questions:

• What disciplines have a higher density of altmetrics (vs. citations)?

• Which terms (topics) have a higher density of altmetrics (vs. citations)?

Methodology• Same WoS publications (matched by DOI with

Altmetric.com indicators) as in Costas et al (2014): half 2011, articles & reviews• 500,229 WoS publications, citations up to 2012

• Degree of ‘citedness’ or ‘altmetricness’ by• Disciplines (Subject Categories)• Topics (terms in the titles)

Main results – Subject categoriesTotal citation score (TCS)

Main results – Subject categoriesTotal altmetric score (TAS)

Main results – Term map

Main results – Term mapTCS

Main results – Term mapTAS

Conclusions & further research• Disciplinary analysis:

• Citations: stronger presence in fields like chemistry, physics or biomedical sciences• Altmetrics: stronger presence in the multidisciplinary journals, general medicine &

health and psychological and social sciences.

• Term map• Citations: stronger presence of terms related with natural sciences and more technical

topics• Altmetrics: stronger focus on social/laymen and medical-related terms, and less

frequent among chemical and physical terms.

• Citations: all topics, but also complex & technical ones. Altmetrics: not very technical/complex topics, more social & laymen ones.

• Further research• More elaborated linguistic analysis to further explore the hypothesis: are laymen terms

more prone to altmetrics?• Better categorization of terms (e.g. with MeSH) in order to delve into the

differences on the thematic orientation of citations and altmetrics.

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References

• Costas, R., Zahedi, Z., & Wouters, P. (2014). Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective (p. 30). Leiden. Retrieved from http://www.cwts.nl/pdf/CWTS-WP-2014-001.pdf

• Haustein, S., Peters, I., Sugimoto, C. R., Thelwall, M., & Larivière, V. (2014). Tweeting Biomedicine : An Analysis of Tweets and Citations in the Biomedical Literature. Journal of the Association for Information Sciences and Technology, 65(4), 656–669. doi:10.1002/asi

Thank you very much for your attention!

Questions?Comments?