#Psychology: a bibliometric analysis of psychological literature in the online media

Sebastian Vogl, Thomas Scherndl and Anton Kühberger ()
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Sebastian Vogl: University of Salzburg
Thomas Scherndl: University of Salzburg
Anton Kühberger: University of Salzburg

Scientometrics, 2018, vol. 115, issue 3, No 7, 1253-1269

Abstract: Abstract Online media and especially social media are becoming more and more relevant to our everyday life. Reflecting this tendency in the scientific community, alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact on the web are increasingly proposed, extending (or even replacing) traditional metrics (e.g., citations, journal impact factor, etc.). This paper explores the relationship between traditional metrics and alternative metrics for psychological research in the years from 2010 to 2012. Traditional publication metrics (e.g., number of citations, impact factor) and alternative metrics (collected from Altmetric, a website that collects and counts references as they appear in Wikipedia, public policy documents, research blogs, mainstream media, or social networks) were extracted and compared, using a dataset of over 245,000 publications from the Web of Science. Results show positive, small to medium, correlations on the level of individual publications, and frequently medium to high correlations on the level of research fields of Psychology. The more accumulated the level of analysis, the higher the correlations. These findings are fairly robust over time and comparable to findings from research areas other than Psychology. Additionally, a new metric, the Score Factor, is proposed as a useful alternative metric to assess a journal’s impact in the online media.

Keywords: Altmetrics; Online media; Psychology; Scholarly impact; Social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-018-2727-5

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