Altmetrics

How do we engage with scholarly research? 


Engagement on Facebook

Asura Enkhbayar, Juan Pablo Alperin

Today, more than 2.2 billion people use Facebook on a daily or almost daily basis. Yet despite its popularity, previous research shows that Facebook is less frequently used to share academic content than other platforms. Perhaps because surprisingly little is know about the nature of Facebook user engagement—especially when it comes to scholarly research. Are people discussing new studies in invite-only groups? Swapping papers in personal messages? Posting articles to private walls? 

In this study, we are investigating the current state of Altmetrics for Facebook to better understand how users communicate about scholarly research on this popular platform. Specifically, we are examining what forms of sharing might be overlooked by today’s Altmetrics methods, what the challenges are of measuring that engagement, and how the current system could be improved to capture those important avenues of communication.


From Mendeley Readership to Citations

Fereshteh Didegah, Juan Pablo Alperin, and Rodrigo Costas

With more than 3 million users in 180 countries, Mendeley has established itself as a major global research collaboration and networking program since its launch in 2009. Yet, despite its increasing popularity, relatively little is known about how academics engage with the platform on a daily basis. Who are Mendley’s users and how are they using its services?

This project aims to shed light on these questions by investigating one key Mendley product: the library. Starting with a pilot study, we analyzed the extent to which users cite the articles saved in their libraries by matching Mendeley user profiles with Scopus author profiles. We found that only 5% of them cited at least one of those articles, showing that the correlations found in previous research do not tell the full story. Now we are exploring the meaning of Mendeley saves further by expanding this pilot to a larger scale dataset across different subject domains.

Related Publications

Alperin, J. P., Fleerackers, A., Riedlinger, M., & Haustein, S. (2023). Second-order citations in altmetrics: a case study analyzing the audiences of COVID-19 research in the news and on social media. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.04.05.535734 Download
Enkhbayar, A., Haustein, S., Barata, G., & Alperin, J. P. (2020). How much research shared on Facebook happens outside of public pages and groups? A comparison of public and private online activity around PLOS ONE papers. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(2), 749–770. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00044 Download
Costas, R., Zahedi, Z., & Alperin, J. P. (2019). Global country-level patterns of Mendeley readership performance compared to citation performance: Does Mendeley provide a different picture on the impact of scientific publications across countries? ISSI Conference, Rome, Italy.
Barata, G. (2019). More relevant alternative metrics for Latin America. Transinformação, 31, e190031. https://doi.org/10.1590/2318-0889201931e190031 Download
Enkhbayar, A., & Alperin, J. P. (2018). Challenges of capturing engagement on Facebook for Altmetrics. STI 2018 Conference Proceedings, 1460–1469. http://arxiv.org/abs/1809.01194