2018/01/30 by Mike Thelwall, Tamara Nevill
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Academic Publishing and Open Access #Altmetrics #Bibliometrics #Citation #Citation impact #Computer science #Data science #Impact factor #Library science #MEDLINE #Meta-analysis and systematic reviews #Political science #Promotion (chess) #Scopus #cs.DL #scientometrics and bibliometrics research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.joi.2018.01.008
published as Journal of Informetrics, 12(1), 237-248 (2018)
openalex publication_date 2018/01/30 · arxiv created 2018/01/31 · arxiv updated 2018/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Altmetrics from Altmetric.com are widely used by publishers and researchers to give earlier evidence of attention than citation counts. This article assesses whether Altmetric.com scores are reliable early indicators of likely future impact and whether they may also reflect non-scholarly impacts. A preliminary factor analysis suggests that the main altmetric indicator of scholarly impact is Mendeley reader counts, with weaker news, informational and social network discussion/promotion dimensions in some fields. Based on a regression analysis of Altmetric.com data from November 2015 and Scopus citation counts from October 2017 for articles in 30 narrow fields, only Mendeley reader counts are consistent predictors of future citation impact. Most other Altmetric.com scores can help predict future impact in some fields. Overall, the results confirm that early Altmetric.com scores can predict later citation counts, although less well than journal impact factors, and the optimal strategy is to consider both Altmetric.com scores and journal impact factors. Altmetric.com scores can also reflect dimensions of non-scholarly impact in some fields.