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Blogs and news sources coverage in altmetrics data providers: a comparative analysis by country, language, and subject

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  • José Luis Ortega

    (Institute for Advanced Social Studies (IESA-CSIC)
    Joint Research Unit Knowledge Transfer and Innovation (UCO-CSIC))

Abstract

The main objective of this study is a detailed analysis of the coverage of blogs and news by three of the most important altmetrics data providers (Altmetric.com, PlumX, and Crossref Event Data). Concretely, the study looks for differences in blogs and news coverage, according to three criteria: country, language, and subject, with a view to detecting biases that influence altmetrics impact. More than 100,000 random publications from Crossref were searched in all three providers. The link, title, and source of the events that mention each document were retrieved. Each source was classified according to the three criteria. Results show that over 65% of blogs and news come from English-speaking countries and over 75% are written in English. In terms of subject matter, General-interest news outlets (> 50% in PlumX and Altmetric.com) and Social Sciences and Humanities blogs (> 20%) prevail. Altmetric.com is the most geographically and linguistically heterogeneous service, with the best coverage of blogs; PlumX collects more news media, especially local-interest newspapers from the United States; and Crossref Event Data is the platform that brings together most English-speaking sources.

Suggested Citation

  • José Luis Ortega, 2020. "Blogs and news sources coverage in altmetrics data providers: a comparative analysis by country, language, and subject," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(1), pages 555-572, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:122:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-019-03299-2
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-019-03299-2
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. José Luis Ortega, 2018. "Reliability and accuracy of altmetric providers: a comparison among Altmetric.com, PlumX and Crossref Event Data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 116(3), pages 2123-2138, September.
    2. Isabella Peters & Peter Kraker & Elisabeth Lex & Christian Gumpenberger & Juan Gorraiz, 2016. "Research data explored: an extended analysis of citations and altmetrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 107(2), pages 723-744, May.
    3. Bornmann, Lutz, 2014. "Validity of altmetrics data for measuring societal impact: A study using data from Altmetric and F1000Prime," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(4), pages 935-950.
    4. Christine Meschede & Tobias Siebenlist, 2018. "Cross-metric compatability and inconsistencies of altmetrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(1), pages 283-297, April.
    5. Saeed-Ul Hassan & Mubashir Imran & Uzair Gillani & Naif Radi Aljohani & Timothy D. Bowman & Fereshteh Didegah, 2017. "Measuring social media activity of scientific literature: an exhaustive comparison of scopus and novel altmetrics big data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(2), pages 1037-1057, November.
    6. Hadas Shema & Judit Bar-Ilan & Mike Thelwall, 2014. "Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations? Research blogs as a potential source for alternative metrics," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 65(5), pages 1018-1027, May.
    7. Rodrigo Costas & Zohreh Zahedi & Paul Wouters, 2015. "Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(10), pages 2003-2019, October.
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    Cited by:

    1. Ramani, Ravi S. & Aguinis, Herman & Coyle-Shapiro, Jacqueline A.M., 2022. "Defining, measuring, and rewarding scholarly impact: mind the level of analysis," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 117286, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Sergio Copiello, 2020. "Other than detecting impact in advance, alternative metrics could act as early warning signs of retractions: tentative findings of a study into the papers retracted by PLoS ONE," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2449-2469, December.
    3. Ortega, José Luis, 2021. "How do media mention research papers? Structural analysis of blogs and news networks using citation coupling," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3).
    4. Houqiang Yu & Xinyun Yu & Xueting Cao, 2022. "How accurate are news mentions of scholarly output? A content analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(7), pages 4075-4096, July.
    5. Yu, Houqiang & Li, Longfei & Cao, Xueting & Chen, Tao, 2022. "Exploring country's preference over news mentions to academic papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(4).
    6. Mousumi Karmakar & Sumit Kumar Banshal & Vivek Kumar Singh, 2021. "A large-scale comparison of coverage and mentions captured by the two altmetric aggregators: Altmetric.com and PlumX," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(5), pages 4465-4489, May.
    7. Yang, Siluo & Zheng, Mengxue & Yu, Yonghao & Wolfram, Dietmar, 2021. "Are Altmetric.com scores effective for research impact evaluation in the social sciences and humanities?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(1).
    8. Alice Fleerackers & Lise Nehring & Lauren A. Maggio & Asura Enkhbayar & Laura Moorhead & Juan Pablo Alperin, 2022. "Identifying science in the news: An assessment of the precision and recall of Altmetric.com news mention data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(11), pages 6109-6123, November.

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