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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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    Cited by:

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    2. 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).
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    5. 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).
    6. 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).
    7. Daniel Torres-Salinas & Domingo Docampo & Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado & Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, 2024. "The many publics of science: using altmetrics to identify common communication channels by scientific field," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(7), pages 3705-3723, July.
    8. 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.
    9. 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.

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