Author-level metrics in the new academic profile platforms: The online behaviour of the Bibliometrics community

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.

26 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables

References in corpus (6)

• A principal component analysis of 39 scientific impact measures
• Grand challenges in altmetrics: heterogeneity, data quality and dependencies
• A review of the characteristics of 108 author-level bibliometric indicators
• Can we use Google Scholar to identify highly-cited documents?
• Do ResearchGate Scores create ghost academic reputations?
• A novel method for depicting academic disciplines through Google Scholar Citations: The case of Bibliometrics

Cited by in corpus (3)

• ResearchGate and Google Scholar: How much do they differ in publications, citations and different metrics and why?
• Which US and European Higher Education Institutions are visible in ResearchGate and what affects their RG Score?
• The Scientometrics and Reciprocality Underlying Co-Authorship Panels in Google Scholar Profiles