With the advent of e-journals more than one decade ago and the increasing use of social media also by academics in recent years, citations are not the only data anymore for measuring scholarly communication. Indeed, so-called altmetrics are a further source for metering science. In our previous research we have already explored commonalities of and differences between citations, downloads and so-called readership data from Mendeley for two information systems journals. This contribution presents a replication of the previous study for a linguistics journal investigating the following research questions: Is there a strong correlation between citations, downloads and readership frequencies? Could downloads and readership counts be a substitute for citations, or do they measure complementary aspects of scholarly communication? Do citations and downloads have different obsolescence characteristics? Are there other aspects in which citations, downloads and readership data differ? The comparison of the results for the linguistic journal with those of the information systems journals enables us to identify also possible disciplinary differences. We used a scientometric approach when analyzing citations, downloads and readership data, which were provided at article level. The major results show that there is a clear but not a very high rank correlation between citations and downloads (r=0.59) which was lower between downloads and readership counts (r=0.53) and between citations and readership counts (r=0.51). Citations and downloads have different obsolescence characteristics. While the download maximum usually occurs for recent articles, it takes several years after publication until the citation maximum is reached. The correlations were slightly higher for the information systems journals. Interestingly, older articles were more often downloaded for them than for Journal of Phonetics. Keywords : citations, downloads, Mendeley, altmetrics, linguistics, Journal of Phonetics.
CITATION STYLE
Schlögl, C., Gorraiz, J., Gumpenberger, C., Jack, K., & Kraker, P. (2014). Are downloads and readership data a substitute for citations? The case of a scholarly journal. In Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA). Retrieved from http://ozk.unizd.hr/proceedings/index.php/lida/article/view/165
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