Does the Global South Have Altmetrics? Analyzing a Brazilian LIS Journal

Introduction As a new emerging field, Altmetrics has become a trendsetter, and received a good deal of attention by researchers involved in the evaluation of scientific research. Moreover, it has led to a notable growth in the related academic literature. The international landscape has displayed an exponential growth in the field of scholarly publishing with several studies exploring altmetrics (both their potential benefits and limitations) in the last 3 years. However, in the Global South this subject is still not widespread, with a few empirical works. Alperín (2014) explored altmetrics measurements from articles in South American journals retrieved from sources such as SciELO, Redalyc and Latindex. This author also carried out an analysis of 21,560 articles published by the Brazilian journals in SciELO. This explored its altmetrics data with the Altmetric.com tool, and showed that these new measurements in the region are still in their early stages. Alperín (2014) also believed that the spread of science on the Internet and social networks in Brazil seems to have been limited in scope. This is because there are few or no sources of alternative performance metrics such as Blogs, Wikipedia, videos and social media like Google Plus, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, and others. The only media that appears to have significant data is Twitter, with 6.03% of mentions, followed by Facebook, with only 2.81%. Nascimento & Oddone (2014) also used Altmetric.com to conduct an analysis of altmetrics indicators in 2 Brazilian journals in Library and Information Science (LIS). This showed that out of a total of 55 articles, 35 (63%) recorded mentions of Twitter, 22 (40%) of Mendeley, 19 (34%) of Facebook and 1 (1%) of Pinterest. Similarly, Araújo (2014) analyzed the altmetrics data of Brazilian LIS journals either through Altmetrics.com, with the cut-outs of 121 articles published in the last 3 editions of 4 core national journals in this area. From this total sample, only 6 articles of 3 different journals returned altmetrics data. Apart from the limited amount of altmetrics data in the source, it is clear that all of the data were from Twitter, with no mentions on Facebook, or on blog posts. Araújo (2014) argues that these meagre results in the use of Altmetrics.com may have been caused by (1) a limitation of the tool due to the issues already considered such as DOI and, others; and (2) the coverage provided by other social media services. It has been suggested that this drawback in the use of social media (such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) can be overcome through the use of an API (Application Programming Interface) that once parametrized, can provide more precise altmetrics indicators from articles (Araújo, 2014). Following this suggestion, we performed an altmetrics analysis of a Brazilian LIS journal (DataGramaZero) through the use of APIs of the two largest social media in Brazil in terms of active users: Facebook and Twitter. DataGramaZero (DGZ) is a pioneer publishing venture in the area of the Brazilian LIS and has had an entirely digital format since its inception, as well as being among the core journals in LIS in the nation. However, the absence of a DOI precludes this journal from obtaining results from the use of tools for altmetrics data collection e.g. Altmetrics.com. In addition, as well as not being indexed in international databases, it is not included in the citation results of Web of Science (WoS). This study seeks to conduct an empirical analysis to check the altmetrics measurements in the DGZ articles as an example of the lack of altmetrics in the Global South.