The Relationship between Altmetric Activity and Quality Indicators of the Library and Information Science Journals in Scopus

The current research aims to investigate the relationship between altmetric activity and quality of the LIS journals indexed by Scopus in 2015.
In this descriptive and relational research, altmetric and bibliometric indicators were utilized to study journals’ performance. The population of the study was comprised of 134 LIS journals in Scopus. Altmetric Explorer, Scopus, Scimago Journal and Country Ranking (SJR) and Journal Metrics were used for data gathering. Moreover, data analysis was conducted using descriptive and inferential tests in Microsoft Excel and SPSS.
Findings: Results of the study revealed that of the 6638 papers with unique DOIs published in LIS journals in 2015, 2524 articles were mentioned at least once in social media platforms (altmetric coverage of 38%). The highest altmetric presence was seen in “Journal of Information Science” with altmetric coverage of 100%. Moreover, “D-Lib Magazine” was received the most altmetric attention with the mean altmetric score of 17.9. The results of running a series of Spearman’s rank correlation tests revealed positive and statistically significant association between two indicators of altmetric activity (altmetric coverage and mean altmetric score) and four indicators of quality (SJR, SNIP, CiteScore and mean citations received).
Results of the current research showed that papers published in higher quality journals, are more likely to be shared in social media tools and get more altmetric attention.