Do traditional scientometric indicators predict social media activity on scientific knowledge? An analysis of the ecological literature

Nabout, João Carlos; Teresa, Fabricio Barreto; Machado, Karine Borges; Prado, Vitor Hugo Mendonça do; Bini, Luis Mauricio; Diniz Filho, José Alexandre Felizola

Do traditional scientometric indicators predict social media activity on scientific knowledge? An analysis of the ecological literature

Data

2018

Autores

Nabout, João Carlos

Teresa, Fabricio Barreto

Machado, Karine Borges

Prado, Vitor Hugo Mendonça do

Bini, Luis Mauricio

Diniz Filho, José Alexandre Felizola

Resumo

Traditional citation-based indicators and activities on Online Social Media Platforms (OnSMP; e.g. Twitter) have been used to assess the impact of scientific research. However, the association between traditional indicators (i.e., number of citations and journal impact factor) and the new OnSMP metrics still deserve further investigations. Here, we used multivariate models to evaluate the relative influence of collaboration, time since publication and traditional indicators on the interest of 2863 papers published in five ecological journals from 2013 to 2015 as given by nine OnSMP. We found that most activities were concentrated on Twitter and Mendeley and that activities in these two OnSMP are highly correlated. Our results indicate that traditional indicators explained most of the variation in OnSMP activity. Considering that OnSMP activities are high as soon as the articles are made available online, contrasting with the slow pace in which the citations are accumulated, our results support the use of activities on OnSMP as an early signal of research impact of ecological articles.

Palavras-chave

Citation rates, Ecology, Altmetric, Science evaluation, Social networks

Citação

NABOUT, João Carlos et al. Do traditional scientometric indicators predict social media activity on scientific knowledge? An analysis of the ecological literature. Scientometrics, Berlim, v. 115, p. 1007-1015, 2018. DOI: 10.1007/s11192-018-2678-x. Disponível em: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-018-2678-x. Acesso em: 16 jun. 2023.