Assessing the relationship between the alternative metrics of visibility and social bookmarking with citation index in PLOS Altmetrics

This article aims to measure the relationship between metrics of visibility and bookmarking in social platforms (Citeulike, Mendeley and Figshare) with citation counts in Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed central and Crossref. Current study is original in terms of objective and the data gathering scheme is descriptive of correlation type with a citation analysis approach. The population in this study is consists of 90,728 research papers which published in PLOS between 2009 and 2013. A sample of 1892 samples was chosen based on Cochran formula. The results showed that the visibility, Citeulike and Mendeley bookmarking counts have significant positive correlation with citations in all of the investigated systems. Conversely, social bookmarking counts on Figshare showed significant negative correlation with citations. Visibility metric has significant positive correlation with bookmarking counts in Citeulike and Mendeley, while it does not correlate with social bookmarking metric on Figshare. The results of this study suggest sharing scientific publications in social networks such as Mendeley, may increases the visibility and the future citations.