Differences between journals and years in the proportions of students, researchers and faculty registering Mendeley articles

Mike Thelwall ()
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Mike Thelwall: University of Wolverhampton

Scientometrics, 2018, vol. 115, issue 2, No 4, 717-729

Abstract: Abstract This article contains two investigations into Mendeley reader counts with the same dataset. Mendeley reader counts provide evidence of early scholarly impact for journal articles, but reflect the reading of a relatively young subset of all researchers. To investigate whether this age bias is constant or varies by narrow field and publication year, this article compares the proportions of student, researcher and faculty readers for articles published 1996–2016 in 36 large monodisciplinary journals. In these journals, undergraduates recorded the newest research and faculty the oldest, with large differences between journals. The existence of substantial differences in the composition of readers between related fields points to the need for caution when using Mendeley readers as substitutes for citations for broad fields. The second investigation shows, with the same data, that there are substantial differences between narrow fields in the time taken for Scopus citations to be as numerous as Mendeley readers. Thus, even narrow field differences can impact on the relative value of Mendeley compared to citation counts.

Keywords: Mendeley; Research evaluation; Readership; Faculty; Students; Citation analysis; Altmetrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-018-2689-7

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