Conférence: «Social media in scholarly communication: what is the meaning of Mendeley reader counts and tweets?»

Présentée par Stefanie Haustein (École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information de l’Université de Montréal) dans le cadre des conférences du CIRST.

Résumé : Based on the assumption that influential papers will be cited by new research that builds upon them, citations to articles are the basis of most quantitative impact indicators. The social web and its introduction into scholarly context has introduced new opportunities to capture impact on a potentially broader audience —not just citing authors— and faster, as social media activity can occur right after online publication. Although it has become apparent that so-called “altmetrics” reflect different types of impact, little is still known about the actual meanings and contexts of these new metrics and what kind of impact they reflect. Since many journals such as Nature and PLoS already provide the number of tweets, Facebook likes, Mendeley readers and other social media metrics, researchers are starting to present altmetrics on their CVs and funders are beginning to consider their use, systematic research is needed to validate these new indicators. Similar to the development of the Science Citation Index by Eugene Garfield in the 1960s which enabled global citation analysis, both qualitative and quantitative research is needed to understand the meaning of social media activity around scholarly content. The talk will provide an overview of our current research including a large-scale analysis of the number of tweets, Mendeley readers and citations of a set of 1.4 million biomedical papers and an in-depth analysis of a selection of 37 astrophysicists on Twitter comparing their tweeting and publication activities.