A correlation comparison between Altmetric Attention Scores and citations for six PLOS journals

This study considered all articles published in six Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals in 2012 and Web of Science citations for these articles as of May 2015. A total of 2,406 articles were analyzed to examine the relationships between Altmetric Attention Scores (AAS) and Web of Science citations. The AAS for an article, provided by Altmetric aggregates activities surrounding research outputs in social media (news outlet mentions, tweets, blogs, Wikipedia, etc.). Spearman correlation testing was done on all articles and articles with AAS. Further analysis compared the stratified datasets based on percentile ranks of AAS: top 50%, top 25%, top 10%, and top 1%. Comparisons across the six journals provided additional insights. The results show significant positive correlations between AAS and citations with varied strength for all articles and articles with AAS (or social media mentions), as well as for normalized AAS in the top 50%, top 25%, top 10%, and top 1% datasets. Four of the six PLOS journals, Genetics, Pathogens, Computational Biology, and Neglected Tropical Diseases, show significant positive correlations across all datasets. However, for the two journals with high impact factors, PLOS Biology and Medicine, the results are unexpected: the Medicine articles showed no significant correlations but the Biology articles tested positive for correlations with the whole dataset and the set with AAS. Both journals published substantially fewer articles than the other four journals. Further research to validate the AAS algorithm, adjust the weighting scheme, and include appropriate social media sources is needed to understand the potential uses and meaning of AAS in different contexts and its relationship to other metrics.

Tags
Data and Resources
To access the resources you must log in

This item has no data

Identity

Description: The Identity category includes attributes that support the identification of the resource.

Field Value
PID https://www.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194962
PID pmc:PMC5886419
PID pmid:29621253
URL https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0194962&type=printable
URL http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5886419
URL https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194962
URL https://core.ac.uk/display/153713656
URL https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/2796344529
URL https://doaj.org/toc/1932-6203
URL http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5886419?pdf=render
URL http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194962
URL https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29621253
URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194962
URL https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0194962
URL https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194962
Access Modality

Description: The Access Modality category includes attributes that report the modality of exploitation of the resource.

Field Value
Access Right Open Access
Attribution

Description: Authorships and contributors

Field Value
Author peiling wang, 0000-0003-4202-7570
Author Qiang Wu, 0000-0002-1308-1669
Contributor van den Besselaar, Peter
Publishing

Description: Attributes about the publishing venue (e.g. journal) and deposit location (e.g. repository)

Field Value
Collected From Europe PubMed Central; PubMed Central; ORCID; Datacite; UnpayWall; DOAJ-Articles; Crossref; Microsoft Academic Graph
Hosted By Europe PubMed Central; PLoS ONE
Publication Date 2018-04-05
Publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Additional Info
Field Value
Language UNKNOWN
Resource Type Other literature type; Article; UNKNOWN
keyword Q
keyword R
keyword keywords.General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
system:type publication
Management Info
Field Value
Source https://science-innovation-policy.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=dedup_wf_001::4d1e31af58ab2d77a7041fb4d4ed86ac
Author jsonws_user
Last Updated 25 December 2020, 14:31 (CET)
Created 25 December 2020, 14:31 (CET)