Dissemination of the Iran's international scientific output in social media

Although citation-based metrics have extensively been used for research evaluation and scientific impact, in recent years social media metrics have also introduced as alternative indicators. This research aims to investigate the presence and attentions received by scientific output of Iran in social media tools.
Research The current study is an applied research using altmetric and scientometric indicators. A total of 43076 documents which specified Iran as their affiliated country and indexed by Scopus in 2015, were selected as the population of the study.
Findings: Results of the study showed relatively low altmetric coverage for scientific output of Iran, with only 5840 documents (13.55%) were mentioned at least once in social media.platforms. These documents have received 28517 mentions in 14 sources of attention, of which Mendeley makes up the highest share (87%), followed by Twitter (77.91%) and Facebook (17.87%). Studying the temporal trend of mentions showed that the highest share of attentions received mainly soon after publishing and then tended to demonstrate a decreasing trend. Almost half of the publications (49.24%) with altmetric score were published in medical sciences area. Moreover, scientific output published through international research collaboration showed higher altmetric scores compared with the mean altmetric score of the country.
Iranian researchers need to know more about the potential and advantages of social media tools in dissemination of scholarly output and evaluation of research impact.