Who reads research articles? An altmetrics analysis of Mendeley user categories

Little detailed information is known about who reads research articles and the contexts in which research articles are read. Using data about people who register in Mendeley as readers of articles, this paper explores different types of users of Clinical Medicine, Engineering and Technology, Social Science, Physics and Chemistry papers inside and outside academia. The majority of readers for all disciplines were PhD students, postgraduates and postdocs but other types of academics were also represented. In addition, many Clinical Medicine papers were read by medical professionals. The highest correlations between citations and Mendeley readership counts were found for types of users that often authored academic papers, except for associate professors in some subdisciplines. This suggests that Mendeley readership can reflect usage similar to traditional citation impact, if the data is restricted to readers who are also authors, without the delay of impact measured by citation counts. At the same time, Mendeley statistics can also reveal the hidden impact of some research papers, such as educational value for nonauthor users inside academia or the impact of research papers on practice for readers outside academia. Keyword: altmetrics, Mendeley, research impact, readership analysis, social bookmarking 1 This is a preprint of an article to be published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology © copyright 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc