The association between Mendeley early readership and later citations in library and information science journals

Altmetrics indicators are useful for assessing the impact of research and have been increasingly used alongside traditional citations in recent years. Mendeley provides readership statistics which give an early indicator of the impact of research outputs. This study aimed to investigate how Mendeley early readership indicator was associated with later citations across nine selected library and information science (LIS) journals. This study examined bibliographic data of 9 LIS journals extracted from the Scopus database over a 17 months period from June 2019 to November 2020. Data were extracted using Webometric Analyst. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was used to characterize the relationship between these two variables. The number of readers per paper, and of each journal are described using mean, standard deviation, frequency, and geometric mean. Readership growth was increased in all selected journals, but citation growth was unstable in most of the journals. Early readership statistics positively correlated with early citation analysis in all journals except the Journal of Educational Media and Library Science, which had a weaker positive correlation. The correlation between early readership and later citation numbers varied, with some journals being moderately positive and some weakly positive.