The performance impact of the Brazilian information science journals on facebook: An altmetric study

Abstract

This article reflects on the Facebook's interactions as elements of online attention and altmetric data. The empirical analysis of the reflections considers the repercussion of Information Science journal articles, indexed in the Periodical Brazilian Information Science Production Repertory (RPPBCI). The collection of the altmetric data was performed through Facebook’s Application Program Interface parameterized by the main and secondary URL of articles from 31 journals. The articles' repercussion indicates an online attention with 13.633 interactions, of which 8.840 are "likes", 2.992 are "shares" and 1.801 are "comments". The Perspectivas em Ciência da Informação Journal has the greatest visibility with 13.4% of the attention received and recent articles achieved high score. In conclusion, interactions with the content of scientific articles on Facebook are rich sources of altmetric data and deserve more attention from scholars in this field. They can be helpful as an aggregate metric for providing an additional view of the articles’ scientific performance when liked, shared or commented.