Bibliometric and Altmetric Analysis of Visibility of Publications in Social Sciences

Considering that the production and dissemination of research knowledge in social sciences and humanities differ from that in other fields, studying their profiles of activity will contribute to proposing new ways to improve their visibility.

In this line, the principal aims of this study are

-identify scientific publications of international prestige in four social sciences research areas: economics, sociology, environmental science and communication.

-detect patterns of scientific activity in each discipline from bibliometric indicators that measure activity, collaboration, impact and visibility.

-gather and analyse the mentions of papers in the social media using altmetric indicators.

-ascertain the possible existence of relationships between scientific impact and social reaction.

A total of 123316 papers published from 2013 to 2015 in the four disciplines was retrieved from the Social Science Citation Index. Economics accounted for the largest number and have a ‘stable’ and consolidated output profile. Environmental science proved to be the most ‘international’ of the disciplines analysed. A relationship was found between collaboration and impact/visibility in all four disciplines. The proportion of papers with mentions in the social media was around 50% in three of the four disciplines, suggesting a relationship between the object of study and the medium for disseminating the findings. Tweets were the most common type of mentions. The percentage of papers and the mean number of citations per paper were greater among those WITH than those WITHOUT mentions in the social media and the same happens with the documents in Open Access.