10.6084/m9.figshare.1568135.v1
Michael Taylor
Michael
Taylor
Engineers Don't Blog and Other Stories (why Scopus uses subject area benchmarking)
figshare
2015
altmetrics
Bibliometrics
socialreach
Science Policy
Applied Computer Science
2015-10-08 08:23:55
Poster
https://figshare.com/articles/poster/Engineers_Don_t_Blog_and_Other_Stories_why_Scopus_uses_subject_area_benchmarking_/1568135
<p>•There are clear differences between subject areas in all types of alternative metrics.</p>
<p>•Scholarly Activity (and Citation) provides the broadest and densest data, closely followed by Social Activity.</p>
<p>•Popular, highly-visible general journals dominate Mass Media and Scholarly Commentary, but are less influential in terms of Citation and Scholarly Activity.</p>
<p>•Life Sciences (esp. Neuroscience and Psychology) are highly active in all areas of alternative metrics.</p>
<p>•Although Engineering attracts a reasonable level of Citation, and is of substantial economic importance, it is either at the bottom or near the bottom for all sources of altmetric.</p>
<p>•Subjects with non-linguistic discourse tend to show lowest levels of activity in discursive channels.</p>
<p>•When comparing publications, normalizing or benchmarking for subject area is essential for all alternative metrics and citation.</p>
<p>Methodology</p>
<p>•2.4M publications indexed by Scopus with a publishing data of 2014</p>
<p>•Citation, Altmetric and Mendeley data sampled in September 10, 2015.</p>
<p>•Alternative metric data collated into four buckets, as defined by Snowball Metrics:</p>
<p>- Social Activity (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google+.</p>
<p>- Scholarly Activity (Mendeley and Citeulike).</p>
<p>- Scholarly Commentary (blogs, Wikipedia, F1000 Prime, Pubpeer, etc.</p>
<p>- Mass media.</p>
<p>•Publications’ data assigned to the journals’ Scopus / ASJC mid-tier subject code (many to one relationship – no fractional counting, total publications for all buckets same as given in ‘Citation’).</p>
<p>•Counts classified into 3 groups – no activity (pale pink), 1 count per publication (red), 2 or more counts (green).</p>
<p>About Scopus benchmarking</p>
<p>•Scopus only computes a bench-mark when there are a minimum of 2500 publications in a cohort.</p>
<p>•A cohort is defined by its Scopus / ASJC subject code, its publishing window and (if N >= 2500 is achieved) its document type (e.g., conference paper, article, review, etc.).</p>
<p>•The publishing window for citation and Scholarly Activity is eighteen months, for other metrics it is two months.</p>
<p>•For each metric being benchmarked, the publication is ranked, the percentile edges calculated, and the percentile assigned.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The dataset is available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/smjj59mbmb.1 </p>