Altmetrics for Country-Level Research Assessment

Changes are occurring in scholarly communication and the geography of science.Policymakersand research funding agencies are looking for ways to measure the comprehensive impact of research and benefit from the research experiences of other nations. Recently, altmetrics have been used to measure broader impact of research activities.In this paper, we study altmetrics based on the country-levelimpact andfind that altmetrics can support research evaluation for all countries studied. We compare altmetrics with several traditional metrics and findsignificant relationshipsbetween country-level altmetrics and the number of publications, citations, h-index, and gross domestic expenditure on research and development (GERD). We also find a significant yearly increase in the number of articles published between 2010 and 2014 that received altmetrics.

[1]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Disciplinary differences in Twitter scholarly communication , 2014, Scientometrics.

[2]  D. King.  The scientific impact of nations , 2004, Nature.

[3]  Bradley M. Hemminger,et al.  Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact , 2012, ArXiv.

[4]  F. Moya‐Anegon,et al.  Science in america latina: A comparison of bibliometric and scientific-technical indicators , 1999 .

[5]  Richard Furuta,et al.  Can Social Reference Management Systems Predict a Ranking of Scholarly Venues? , 2013, TPDL.

[6]  Loet Leydesdorff,et al.  Macro-level indicators of the relations between research funding and research output , 2009, J. Informetrics.

[7]  Euan A. Adie,et al.  Altmetric: enriching scholarly content with article‐level discussion and metrics , 2013, Learn. Publ..

[8]  Vincent Larivière,et al.  Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature , 2013, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[9]  Stuart Macdonald,et al.  User Engagement in Research Data Curation , 2009, ECDL.

[10]  Ping Zhou,et al.  The growth momentum of China in producing international scientific publications seems to have slowed down , 2013, Inf. Process. Manag..

[11]  Rodrigo Costas,et al.  How well developed are altmetrics? A cross-disciplinary analysis of the presence of ‘alternative metrics’ in scientific publications , 2014, Scientometrics.

[12]  Richard Furuta,et al.  Understanding the Dynamic Scholarly Research Needs and Behavior as Applied to Social Reference Management , 2011, TPDL.

[13]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Mendeley readership altmetrics for the social sciences and humanities: Research evaluation and knowledge flows , 2014, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[14]  Judit Bar-Ilan,et al.  Beyond citations: Scholars' visibility on the social Web , 2012, ArXiv.

[15]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Are scholarly articles disproportionately read in their own country? An analysis of mendeley readers , 2015, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[16]  Richard Smith,et al.  Measuring the social impact of research , 2001, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[17]  Peter Vinkler,et al.  Correlation between the structure of scientific research, scientometric indicators and GDP in EU and non-EU countries , 2008, Scientometrics.

[18]  Richard Furuta,et al.  Do altmetrics follow the crowd or does the crowd follow altmetrics? , 2014, IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.

[19]  S. Meo,et al.  Impact of GDP, Spending on R&D, Number of Universities and Scientific Journals on Research Publications among Asian Countries , 2013, PloS one.

[20]  L. Taşli,et al.  Scientific productivity of OECD countries in dermatology journals within the last 10‐year period , 2012, International journal of dermatology.

[21]  L. Bornmann,et al.  Macro-Indicators of Citation Impacts of Six Prolific Countries: InCites Data and the Statistical Significance of Trends , 2013, PloS one.