Rodrigo Costas, Zohreh Zahedi & Paul Wouters

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.

13

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?