Assessing research impact based on altmetrics case study: Iranian scientific products in social sciences and computer science indexed in scopus

Abstract

This study is an applied research.The main aim of this research is to evaluate the impact of the selected Iranian scientific products in two areas of social sciences and computer science indexed in Scopus using alternative indicators (Altmetrics). The research community consists of the articles of the Iranian researchers in the subject areas of computer science and social sciences indexed at the Scopus Database in 2014-2018. Some of the most important altmetric service providers such as Altmetrics Explorer and Plum Analytics have been used to assess the presence of the research outputs in the social media and their impact assessment. Also, the relationship between variables such as scientific collaboration of researchers, open access journals and the quality of research journals with altmetric activity have been investigated through appropriate correlation tests. The findings of data analysis showed that in the field of social sciences, the extent of the presence of the articles of the Iranian researchers in the social media is about 12% and in the field of computer science is only about 4% of the total retrieved articles. The most important social media publishing Iranian articles in each of the two subject areas are Mendeley, Twitter and Facebook. Due to the low level of correlation coefficient between the two variables of scientific collaboration of researchers and the altmetric activity, it seems that the increase in the number of authors in the two thematic areas does not have a significant effect on the altmetric score of these articles. The results of the correlation test showed a significant and weak statistical relation between journal openness and the altmetric scores in the social sciences. While in the field of computer science there was no significant statistical relation between these two variables. Also, due to the correlation between the two variables of the quality of the journals published the studied articles and their altmetric activity in both areas of the study, it can be concluded that the published articles in the journals with higher quality indicators have higher altmetric scores and are more likely to be present in social media. The results of these studies show that using altmetric indicators, one can evaluate the impact of research in different subject areas and compare them. Science and technology policy makers can consider the presence of articles in social media and altmetric indices in scientific policy along with traditional research evaluation indicators.