The Role of Social Media in Assessing the Impact of Research(Case Study: The Field of Scientometrics)

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of scientific social media in evaluating the impact of research in the field of scientometrics. This study is an applied research using the altmetrics method (social web metrics). The research population consists of articles and citations published in two core journals (scientometrics, Journal of informetrics) in a time interval Five Years (2012-2016). Collecting and extracting the articles directly was carried from Springer and ScienceDirect databases. The altmetric bookmarklet, a service provided by Altmetric Institute was used for data collection. In the first step, research articles with the highest altmetric scores representing the quantity and quality of the attention received by an article in social media was identified. Articles with the highest altmetric scores will be identified.  Also, the presence of Iranian articles in the field of scientometrics in various social media and their effectiveness were analyzed. The association between altmetric scores and citation indicators was investigated using correlation tests.The findings indicated a significant, positive and weak statistical relation between the number of citations of the articles and the altmetric scores of these articles, as well as the number of readers of the literature in this area in the two social networks (Mendeley and Citeulike) with the number of citations received in WOS. In this study, there was no statistically significant relationship between the number of citations of the articles and the number of readers on Twitter. In sum, the above findings suggest that some social networks and their indices can be as representations of the impact of scientific papers, similar citations. However, due to the weakness of the correlation coefficients, the replacement of these two categories of indicators is not recommended, but it is possible to use the altmetrics indicators as complementary scientometrics indicators in evaluating the research and calculating the scientific effect.