An altmetric analysis of scholarly articles from India

Issue title: Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems applied to Language & Knowledge Engineering

Guest editors: David Pinto, Vivek Kumar Singh, Aline Villavicencio, Philipp Mayr-Schlegel and Efstathios Stamatatos

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Banshal, Sumit Kumar^a | Singh, Vivek Kumar^{b; *} | Kaderye, Golam^a | Muhuri, Pranab Kumar^a | Sánchez, Belém Priego^c

Affiliations: [a] Department of Computer Science, South Asian University, New Delhi, India | [b] Department of Computer Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India | [c] Department of Systems, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Azcapotzalco, Mexico

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Vivek Kumar Singh, Department of Computer Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi 221005, India. Tel.: +91 9971995005; E-mail: vivekks12@gmail.com.

Abstract: Scholarly articles are considered one of the primary medium for dissemination of inventions and discoveries. Traditionally, usefulness and popularity of a scholarly article has been measured in terms of citations it receives. However, in the changed research publishing landscape, where most of the publications are now available in digital form accessible through various digital libraries; new measures of measuring usefulness of scholarly articles have emerged. Nowadays, scholarly articles are easily available for access and download from various digital access portals. The use and popularity of these digital access portals has also made it possible to integrate various social media platforms with journal access and use. Most of the journals now maintain statistics about reads, number of downloads, social profile shares etc. Several newer platforms like ResearchGate, Academia and Mendeley have also become popular. Researchers now often share their articles on various such platforms and also use social media channels to disseminate their article to a wider audience. This transformed environment has allowed to track and measure usefulness and popularity of scholarly articles through alternative metrics (now popularly known as Altmetrics) as compared to traditional citation impact measures. Altmetrics attempts to derive impact of a scholarly article by using data from different kinds such as social network share, mentions, tweets etc. The use of Altmetrics varies widely from country to country and discipline to discipline. This paper attempts to present findings of an exploratory analysis of relevance of Altmetrics data through a case study of scholarly articles from India published during 2016 and indexed in Web of Science and also updated on ResearchGate. The results obtained provide an interesting insight on relatedness and correlation of presence of scholarly articles in Web of Science and ResearchGate. It is observed that about 61% papers indexed in Web of Science have an entry in ResearchGate. There are, however, disciplinary variations in presence of articles in ResearchGate. Only about 61% of the total disciplines in Web of Science are found to be covered in ResearchGate.

Keywords: Scholarly articles, altmetrics, ResearchGate, social network analysis, Indian Research Output

DOI: 10.3233/JIFS-169495

Journal: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 34, no. 5, pp. 3111-3118, 2018