Scientific bloggers under the altmetric microscope

Abstract

In this paper we present a preliminary altmetric study of scientific bloggers and how they use different social media (i.e. blogs, social bookmarking systems, and Twitter) for scholarly communication, information dissemination, and creation of visibility. We analyzed linking behavior in blog posts and tweets, number of comments assigned to blog posts and share of publications found in social bookmarking systems. Results show that heavy tweeting and blogging do not result in large numbers of followers and comments, tweets and blog posts contain lots of URLs and self-citations, and share of publications found in social bookmarking systems varies between different platforms.