Altmetrics and citations

Publications arising from work at the SSPPS NMR Facility are tracked on the Facility's Publications webpage. Along with breakdowns of the list by year, lab and journal, this page also reports the Altmetric score for each publication. This is a measure of the attention the article has received, predominantly on social media. To see how the Altmetric score compares with citations I prepared a few graphs.

The Altmetric score is calculated from the number of times an article is mentioned in traditional media, on blogs, on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and various other sources. The score is provided by a company called Digital Science. For citations I turned to Web of Science and used their core database citation count. Of the 218 papers on the Facility publication list, 207 were indexed in Web of Science, and 155 had Altmetric scores. The graph below shows Altmetric scores plotted against year with three of the higher scoring papers labelled. As might be expected, more recent papers tend to have higher Altmetric scores as social media is increasingly used to promote publications. The Jang et al 2013 paper is unusual it that it was mentioned by news organisations more than social media.

The graph of citations versus publication year appears below and shows a different trend, the more recent papers have less citations. Again, this is to be expected as it takes time for a paper to accumulate citations. To show the data more clearly this graph excludes two papers with very high citation counts, Wang et al 2014 with 2,237 citations, and Yamanaka et al 2014 with 318. Three of the more highly cited papers are identified and none of these, or the two that were excluded, include the three with high Altmetric scores labelled on the first graph.

Finally, the graph of Altmetric score against citations is shown below with selected papers labelled. The straight line shows an attempt to fit the points to a linear correlation (R²=0.095), which is obviously not there. The inset shows an expansion of the lower left corner of the graph.

Digital Science developed the Altmetric score to measure the early impact of a publication as citation counts may take years to reflect a paper's impact. These graphs suggest that it does report on something different from citation counts and that the Altmetric score really is an alternative metric.

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