Research Article: “Beyond Citations: Scholars’ Visibility on the Social Web” (Preprint)

Title

Beyond Citations: Scholars’ Visibility on the Social Web

Authors

Judit Bar-Ilan
Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University (Israel)
Stefanie Haustein
Central Library, Forschungszentrum Julich  (Germany)
Isabella Peters
Department of Information Science, Heinrich-Heine-University (Germany)
Jason Priem
School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (USA)
Hadas Shema
Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University (Israel)
Jens Terliesnes
Department of Information Science, Heinrich-Heine-University (Germany)

Source

Prepint via arXiv
This paper will be presented at the 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators. Montreal, Canada, 5-8 Sept. 2012.

Abstract

Traditionally, scholarly impact and visibility have been measured by counting publications and citations in the scholarly literature. However, increasingly scholars are also visible on the Web, establishing presences in a growing variety of social ecosystems. But how wide and established is this presence, and how do measures of social Web impact relate to their more traditional counterparts? To answer this, we sampled 57 presenters from the 2010 Leiden STI Conference, gathering publication and citations counts as well as data from the presenters’ Web “footprints.” We found Web presence widespread and diverse: 84% of scholars had homepages, 70% were on LinkedIn, 23% had public Google Scholar profiles, and 16% were on Twitter. For sampled scholars’ publications, social reference manager bookmarks were compared to Scopus and Web of Science citations; we found that Mendeley covers more than 80% of sampled articles, and that Mendeley bookmarks are significantly correlated (r=.45) to Scopus citation counts.

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