The Representation of Climate Variability researches in Social Media: A Scientometric and Altmetric analysis

Considering the development of social web, its capacities in publishing research findings, researchers’ tendency in utilizing social web to increase their visibility, beside the importance to answer the question of how to measure the research social impact, the present study attempts to provide new insights into the amount of scientific and social users' attention to climate variability articles and do co-occurrence analysis of the key terms. This is to provide scholars with a knowledge visualization in the field and help them identify central or neglected issues.

The current applied research was conducted through altmetrics method along with the use of co-word analysis. The climate variability articles analyzed using descriptive and analytic statistics in Excel, VoS viewer and SPSS version 20.

The results showed that a number of 2755 articles in the field received 89129 citations over the past 41 years. The most cited article published in 2000, received 1458 citations. The growth rate of the publications in the field was 2366 percent with the largest number of annual publications in 2017. The United States, China and Germany contributed the largest number of articles, respectively, while Iran ranked 43. From among 2556 articles with DOIs, a number of 1447 items were available from Altmetric explorer and received a total of 8832 social citations in 14 social Medias. Mendeley (92358 reads) and Twitter (6480 tweets) were the most used social media, respectively, followed by news outlet, blogs, and policy documents. The most active users of Twitter, Facebook, news media and policy documents are from the US. The altmetrics attention score of the most influential papers is 651 and for an Iranian paper was 82, published in 2016 and 2015 respectively. Spearman test showed that there was a significant though weak relationship between citation and altmetric score. The most productive, most socially and academic cited subject categories was multidisciplinary sciences. Visualizing climate variability articles revealed that sea surface temperature, global warming, southern oscillation, and El Niño were the most frequently used key terms in the articles.

The value of this research lies in providing a picture of four decades of research in the field and in the clarification of the extent to which social network users pay attention to climate variability issues and how much is the power of altmetrics in showing the impact of science on society and research evaluation.