Analyzing readerships of International Iranian publications in Mendeley: an altmetrics study

In this study, the presence and distribution of both Mendeley readerships (usage) and Web of Science (WoS) citations for the publications published in the 43 Iranian international journals indexed in JCR have been investigated. The aim was to determine the impact, visibility and use of the publications published by the Iranian international journals in Mendeley compared to their citation impact; furthermore, to explore if there is any relation between these two impact indicators (Mendeley readership counts and WoS citation counts) for these publications (i.e. the extent to which Mendeley readership counts correlate with citation indicators). The DoIs of the 1,884 publications used to extract the readerships data from Mendeley REST API in February 2014 and citations data until end of 2013 calculated using CWTS in-house WoS database. SPSS (version 21) used to analyze the relationship between the readerships and citations for those publications. The Mendeley usage distribution both at the publication level (across publications years, fields and document types) and at the user level (across users’ disciplines, academic status and countries) have been investigated. These information will help to understand the visibility and usage vs citation pattern and impact of Iranian scientific outputs. The findings indicate that 52% of those publications are saved in Mendeley; also, these publications on average have more readership per paper (RPP) (2.63) than citation per paper (CPP) (.49); also, the publications with at least one Mendeley readers exhibits more CPP (.49) compared to those that are not saved in Mendeley (i.e. with zero readership) (.39). This may indicate the benefit of saving document in Mendeley for these publications. . Out of 16,478 publications, 1,884 of them have DOIs out of which 1,389 were saved in Mendeley . 2 ٧ و ٨ ا ١٣٩٢ ن ا – اد ن ا ن ا In terms of relations with citation, a weak spearman correlation (r = 0.179) has been found between Mendeley readership counts and citation indicators. This may suggest that users use these scientific outputs for reasons other than using and citing them in their scholarly practices (such as learning, teaching, self-awareness, etc.) which worth to explore in further research. These findings also indicate that at the publication level, articles and reviews; publications from year 2013 and Medical and Engineering are among the most common document types, publication year and disciplines saved in Mendeley. Regarding the user level, Iranian international publications are mostly used by users from countries such as US, UK and Germany; PhDs as an academic status and disciplines such as Engineering, biological and medical sciences. Mendeley readership data offers useful statistics and metadata about the impact and usage pattern of scientific outputs by different user types that are not available by citation databases; this information helps to formulate other types of impact than only scientific one and could be used as an informative and complimentary tool beside citation databases in interpreting impact of scholarly outputs. still many research needed to be done to dig more into these new metrics; their meaning and validity and reliability before its application in research evaluation.