Abstract
In this study we examined a sample of 100 European astrophysicists and their publications indexed by the citation database Scopus, submitted to the arXiv repository and bookmarked by readers in the reference manager Mendeley. Although it is believed that astrophysicists use arXiv widely and extensively, the results show that on average more items are indexed by Scopus than submitted to arXiv. A considerable proportion of the items indexed by Scopus appear also on Mendeley, but on average the number of readers who bookmarked the item on Mendeley is much lower than the number of citations reported in Scopus. The comparisons between the data sources were done based on the authors and the titles of the publications.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
arXiv. (2013a). Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=arXiv&oldid=565824986.
arXiv. (2013b). arXiv submission rate statistics. Retrieved from http://arXiv.org/help/stats/2012_by_area/index.
Bar-Ilan, J. (2012a). JASIST@Mendeley. Presented at the altmetrics12 workshop of the ACM Web Science Conference. Retrieved from http://altmetrics.org/altmetrics12/bar-ilan/.
Bar-Ilan, J. (2012b). JASIST 2001–2010. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 38(6), 24–28.
Bar-Ilan, J., Haustein, S., Peters, I., Priem, J., Shema, S., & Terliesner, J. (2012). Beyond citations: Scholars’ visibility on the social Web. In Proceedings of the 17th international conference of science and technology indicators, Montreal, Canada, (pp.98–109).
Cronin, B. (2001). Hyperauthorship: A postmodern perversion or evidence of a structural shift in scholarly communication practices? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(7), 558–569.
Eysenbach, G. (2011). Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on Twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 13(4):e123. Retrieved from http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/.
Grinsparg, P. (1994). First steps towards electronic research communication. Computers in Physics, 8(4), 390–396.
Henning, V., & Reichelt, J. (2008). Mendeley—A Last.fm for research? In Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Conference on eScience, pp. 327–328.
Kurtz, M. J., & Bollen, J. (2010). Usage bibliometrics. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 44, 1–64.
Larivière, V., Macaluso, B., Sugimoto, C. R., Milojevic, S., Cronin, B., & Thelwall, M. (2013). The nuanced nature of e-print use: A case study of arXiv. In Proceedings of the 14th international society of scientometrics and informetrics conference, Vienna, Austria, vol II, (pp.1321).
Li, X., & Thelwall, M. (2012). F1000, Mendeley and traditional bibliometric indicators. In Proceedings of the 17th International conference of science and technology indicators, Montreal, Canada, (pp.451–551).
Li, X., Thelwall, M., & Giustini, D. (2012). Validating online reference managers for scholarly impact measurement. Scientometrics, 91(2), 461–471.
Mendeley. (2013). Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mendeley&oldid=568824151.
Milojevič, S. (2010). Modes of collaboration in modern science: beyond power laws and preferential attachment? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(7), 1410–1423.
Moed, H. F. (2007). The effect of “open access” on citation impact: An analysis of arXiv’s condensed matter section. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 2047–2054.
Mohammadi, E., & Thelwall, M. (in press) Mendeley readership altmetrics for the social sciences and humanities: Research evaluation and knowledge flows. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Priem, J., Piwowar, H., & Hemminger, B. (2012). Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact. Retrieved from http://arXiv.org/html/1203.4745v1.
Priem, J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P., & Neylon, C. (2010). Altmetrics: A manifesto. Retrieved from http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/.
Schneider, J. W. (2013). Caveats for using statistical significance test is research assessments. Journal of Informetrics, 7(1), 50–62.
Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (in press). Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations? Research blogs as a potential source of alternative metrics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Thelwall, M., Haustein, S., Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. (2013). Do altmetrics work? Twitter and ten other candidates. PLoS ONE, 8(5), e64841.
Wouters, P., Costas, R. (2012). Users, narcissism and control—Tracking the impact of scholarly publications in the 21st century. Utrecht: SURF foundation. Retrieved from: http://www.surffoundation.nl/nl/publicaties/Documents/Users%20narcissism%20and%20control.pdf.
Zahedi, Z., Costas, R., & Wouters, P. (2013). How well developed are altmetrics? Cross-disciplinary analysis of the presence of ‘alternative metrics’ in scientific publications. In Proceedings of the 14th International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference, Vienna, Austria, vol. I, pp. 876–884.
Acknowledgments
This research reported in this paper was funded by the EU FP7 ACUMEN project (Grant Agreement: 266632).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bar-Ilan, J. Astrophysics publications on arXiv, Scopus and Mendeley: a case study. Scientometrics 100, 217–225 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1215-1
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1215-1