Beyond the dependencies of altmetrics : conceptualizing ‘ heterogeneous couplings ’ between social media and science

Altmetrics, and more specifically social media metrics, have a genuine network nature (Haustein, Bowman, & Costas, 2016). However, this networked component has been less explored in the altmetric literature. Recent developments proposing the analysis of communities of attention (Haustein, Bowman, & Costas, 2015), the follower/followee relationships for scholarly authors on Twitter (Robinson-Garcia, van Leeuwen, & Rafols, 2015), or the co-readership (Kraker, Schlögl, Jack, & Lindstaedt, 2015) and readership coupling (Haunschild & Bornmann, 2015) networks on Mendeley have been already proposed. However, a general conceptualization and modelling of the different types of network interactions between social media and scholarly objects is still missing. The aim of this paper is to provide some systematic discussion around this point.