2022 VOLUME 2 ISSUE 1
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Citation versus altmetrics of papers published in PLOS ONE: A comparative analysis of six countries
AUTHOR
Jingda Ding, Wei Cai, Jie Guo, Xinjing Liu, Chao Liu
ABSTRACT
With the development of open access, more scientific papers show the multi-dimensional academic impact, which makes researchers focus on the comparison between altmetrics and citations. By the use of statistical analysis, we compare the citation and altmetrics of open access papers published in PLoS in past 10 years by 6 countries which are selected in terms of regional distribution, scientific level, native language, etc., and find the following conclusions: Firstly, the level of scientific development and publication content in different countries have more effect on the 4 indicators of "citation", "save", "view" and "share" than the native language. Second, there is a significantly positive correlation between "citation" and "save" in the 6 countries, so as the "citation" and "view", while the altmetrics of "share" is just opposite. Therefore, to some extent, the altmetrics of "view" and "save" could be used to evaluate the scientific influence as a complement measurement of traditional citation metrics. Moreover, correlation coefficients between citations and part of altmetrics of the 6 countries are strong. Finally, the curve peaks of the 6 countries occurred in different years, papers published by developed countries have been active for slightly longer than that by developing countries. In detail, the "citation", "save"and "view" peaks occurred later in developing countries such as China and Brazil than in some developed countries. Besides, the "share" peak occurred after 6 or 7 years, which is similar for the 6 countries.
KEYWORDS
Open access; Citation metrics; Altmetrics; Scientific development; Publication content; Geographical area