IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v126y2021i5d10.1007_s11192-021-03941-y.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A large-scale comparison of coverage and mentions captured by the two altmetric aggregators: Altmetric.com and PlumX

Author

Listed:
  • Mousumi Karmakar

    (Banaras Hindu University)

  • Sumit Kumar Banshal

    (Daffodil International University)

  • Vivek Kumar Singh

    (Banaras Hindu University)

Abstract

The increased social media attention to scholarly articles has resulted in creation of platforms & services to track the social media transactions around them. Altmetric.com and PlumX are two such popular altmetric aggregators. Scholarly articles get mentions in different social platforms (such as Twitter, Blog, Facebook) and academic social networks (such as Mendeley, Academia and ResearchGate). The aggregators track activity and events in social media and academic social networks and provide the coverage and transaction data to researchers for various purposes. Some previous studies have compared different altmetric aggregators and found differences in the coverage and mentions captured by them. This paper attempts to revisit the question by doing a large-scale analysis of altmetric mentions captured by the two aggregators, for a set 1,785,149 publication records from Web of Science. Results obtained show that PlumX tracks more altmetric sources and captures altmetric events for a larger number of articles as compared to Altmetric.com. However, the coverage and average mentions of the two aggregators, for the same set of articles, vary across different platforms, with Altmetric.com recording higher mentions in Twitter and Blog, and PlumX recording higher mentions in Facebook and Mendeley. The article also analysed coverage and average mentions captured by the two aggregators across different document types, subjects and publishers.

Suggested Citation

  • 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.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:126:y:2021:i:5:d:10.1007_s11192-021-03941-y
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-021-03941-y
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-021-03941-y
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-021-03941-y?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. Ortega, José Luis, 2018. "The life cycle of altmetric impact: A longitudinal study of six metrics from PlumX," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 579-589.
    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. Thelwall, Mike & Nevill, Tamara, 2018. "Could scientists use Altmetric.com scores to predict longer term citation counts?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 237-248.
    6. Stefanie Haustein & Isabella Peters & Judit Bar-Ilan & Jason Priem & Hadas Shema & Jens Terliesner, 2014. "Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1145-1163, November.
    7. Mike Thelwall, 2018. "Early Mendeley readers correlate with later citation counts," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(3), pages 1231-1240, June.
    8. 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.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yashan Li & Jinge Mao & Lin Zhang & Dongbo Wang & Si Shen & Ying Huang, 2022. "How scientific research incorporates policy: an examination using the case of China’s science and technology evaluation system," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(9), pages 5283-5306, September.
    2. 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.
    3. Enrique Orduña-Malea & Adolfo Alonso-Arroyo & José-Antonio Ontalba-Ruipérez & Ferrán Catalá-López, 2023. "Evaluating the online impact of reporting guidelines for randomised trial reports and protocols: a cross-sectional web-based data analysis of CONSORT and SPIRIT initiatives," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(1), pages 407-440, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. 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.
    2. Ortega, José Luis, 2020. "Proposal of composed altmetric indicators based on prevalence and impact dimensions," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    3. Maryam Moshtagh & Tahereh Jowkar & Maryam Yaghtin & Hajar Sotudeh, 2023. "The moderating effect of altmetrics on the correlations between single and multi-faceted university ranking systems: the case of THE and QS vs. Nature Index and Leiden," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(1), pages 761-781, January.
    4. Mike Thelwall & Kayvan Kousha & Mahshid Abdoli & Emma Stuart & Meiko Makita & Paul Wilson & Jonathan Levitt, 2023. "Do altmetric scores reflect article quality? Evidence from the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 74(5), pages 582-593, May.
    5. 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).
    6. Daniela De Filippo & Fernanda Morillo & Borja González-Albo, 2023. "Measuring the Impact and Influence of Scientific Activity in the Humanities and Social Sciences," Publications, MDPI, vol. 11(2), pages 1-17, June.
    7. Latefa Ali Dardas & Malik Sallam & Amanda Woodward & Nadia Sweis & Narjes Sweis & Faleh A. Sawair, 2023. "Evaluating Research Impact Based on Semantic Scholar Highly Influential Citations, Total Citations, and Altmetric Attention Scores: The Quest for Refined Measures Remains Illusive," Publications, MDPI, vol. 11(1), pages 1-16, January.
    8. Zhou, Qingqing & Zhang, Chengzhi, 2021. "Breaking community boundary: Comparing academic and social communication preferences regarding global pandemics," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3).
    9. Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese & Paolo Ciancarini & Aldo Gangemi & Silvio Peroni & Francesco Poggi & Valentina Presutti, 2019. "Do altmetrics work for assessing research quality?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 118(2), pages 539-562, February.
    10. Johanna M. Askeridis, 2018. "An h index for Mendeley: comparison of citation-based h indices and a readership-based hmen index for 29 authors," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 117(1), pages 615-624, October.
    11. Banshal, Sumit Kumar & Gupta, Solanki & Lathabai, Hiran H & Singh, Vivek Kumar, 2022. "Power Laws in altmetrics: An empirical analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(3).
    12. 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.
    13. Jyoti Paswan & Vivek Kumar Singh & Mousumi Karmakar & Prashasti Singh, 2022. "Does university–industry–government collaboration in research gets higher citation and altmetric impact? A case study from India," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(11), pages 6063-6082, November.
    14. Yu Liu & Dan Lin & Xiujuan Xu & Shimin Shan & Quan Z. Sheng, 2018. "Multi-views on Nature Index of Chinese academic institutions," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(3), pages 823-837, March.
    15. 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).
    16. Paul Kudlow & Devin Bissky Dziadyk & Alan Rutledge & Aviv Shachak & Gunther Eysenbach, 2020. "The citation advantage of promoted articles in a cross‐publisher distribution platform: A 12‐month randomized controlled trial," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 71(10), pages 1257-1274, October.
    17. Chieh Liu & Mu-Hsuan Huang, 2022. "Exploring the relationships between altmetric counts and citations of papers in different academic fields based on co-occurrence analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(8), pages 4939-4958, August.
    18. Qianjin Zong & Yafen Xie & Rongchan Tuo & Jingshi Huang & Yang Yang, 2019. "The impact of video abstract on citation counts: evidence from a retrospective cohort study of New Journal of Physics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(3), pages 1715-1727, June.
    19. Mohammadamin Erfanmanesh & A. Noorhidawati & A. Abrizah, 2019. "What can Bookmetrix tell us about the impact of Springer Nature’s books," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(1), pages 521-536, October.
    20. Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado & Daniel Torres-Salinas & Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, 2021. "Identifying and characterizing social media communities: a socio-semantic network approach to altmetrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(11), pages 9267-9289, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:126:y:2021:i:5:d:10.1007_s11192-021-03941-y. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.