Research Article: “Author-Level Metrics in the New Academic Profile Platforms: The Online Behaviour of the Bibliometrics Community” (Preprint)

Note: The following full text article (accepted for publication manuscript version) was recently shared by the authors on arXiv.
Title
Author-Level Metrics in the New Academic Profile Platforms: The Online Behaviour of the Bibliometrics Community
Authors
Alberto Martín-Martín
Universidad de Granada, Spain
Enrique Orduna-Malea
Universitat Politècnica de València
Emilio Delgado López-Cózar
Universidad de Granada, Spain
Source
via arXiv
Accepted for Publication in Journal of Infometrics Version
Final Version Available via Journal of Infometrics (Vol. 12 No.2; 2018)
Abstract

The new web-based academic communication platforms do not only enable researchers to better advertise their academic outputs, making them more visible than ever before, but they also provide a wide supply of metrics to help authors better understand the impact their work is making.
This study has three objectives: a) to analyse the uptake of some of the most popular platforms (Google Scholar Citations, ResearcherID, ResearchGate, Mendeley and Twitter) by a specific scientific community (bibliometrics, scientometrics, informetrics, webometrics, and altmetrics); b) to compare the metrics available from each platform; and c) to determine the meaning of all these new metrics.
To do this, the data available in these platforms about a sample of 811 authors (researchers in bibliometrics for whom a public profile Google Scholar Citations was found) were extracted. A total of 31 metrics were analysed.
The results show that a high number of the analysed researchers only had a profile in Google Scholar Citations (159), or only in Google Scholar Citations and ResearchGate (142). Lastly, we find two kinds of metrics of online impact. First, metrics related to connectivity (followers), and second, all metrics associated to academic impact. This second group can further be divided into usage metrics (reads, views), and citation metrics. The results suggest that Google Scholar Citations is the source that provides more comprehensive citation-related data, whereas Twitter stands out in connectivity-related metrics.

Direct to Full Text Article (26 pages; PDF)

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