Exploring the Impact of Altmetrics in Relation to Citation Count and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)

Abstract

A tide of new research metrics of social web analysis has drawn the attention of researchers from quite some time now. This new alternative metrics – referred to as the Altmetrics, to some degree, is considered to complement the traditional metric indicators especially the citation metrics. Citations reflect the impact of the research mostly from the academic sections while Altmetrics besides academics demonstrates the consumption of research from a wider community including practitioners, instructors and general public too. Since, both i.e., Altmetrics and citation count are employed to gauge the research impact, therefore, this study attempts to correlate the two in order to determine their extent of comparability and association. The Altmetric scores were compared with the citation counts for the articles associated with the field of Biological Sciences, Earth and Environmental Science, History and Archaeology and Studies in Human Society from the list of top 100 articles, provided by the aggregator - altmetric.com for time period 2014 – 2017. Besides, the harvested articles' altmetric scores were correlated with the SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) of the journals of the respective articles in which they were published. Finally, Spearman's correlation was calculated to gauge the association between the variables. The study found that among the four categories, Earth and Environmental science shows the most significant correlation between the citation count and Altmetric score while for the Altmetrics and SJR score in the said field, no such trend is visible. History and Archaeology also shows the strong correlation between the Altmetrics and citation scores with the exception of articles for the year-2016 and somewhat similar trend was noted for the Altmetrics and SJR score of the publications. Biological sciences show a weak correlation for both the pairs of variables while those pertaining to studies in human society mostly show negative association for both sets of variables. Thus, from analysis it can be deduced that, excluding the category of human society, the other three categories (i.e., Biological Sciences, Earth and Environmental science, History and Archaeology), mostly show positive correlation between the Altmetrics and citation score of publications and also, to some extent, for the Altmetrics and SJR score of the publications. The study would provide an insight in the association and degree of relation between the two-research metrics for their better usability and applicability.