Figures of: Tweets vs. Mendeley readers: How do these two social media metrics differ?

A set of 1.4 million biomedical papers was analyzed with regards to how often articles are mentioned on Twitter or saved by users on Mendeley. While Twitter is a microblogging platform used by a general audience to distribute information, Mendeley is a reference manager targeted at an academic user group to organize scholarly literature. Both platforms are used as sources for so-called “altmetrics” to measure a new kind of research impact. This analysis shows in how far they differ and compare to traditional citation impact metrics based on a large set of Pubmed PubMed papers.

Figure 1: Frameworks representing Mendeley (A) and Twitter data (B) on the level of NSF specialties. Specialties are shown if they were represented in PubMed by more than 100 papers for the 2010-2012 period and more than 30 read (A) or tweeted (B) papers in 2011.

Figure A1: Scatterplot of number of citations and number of tweets (A, ρ=0.181**) and Mendeley readers (B, ρ=0.677**) for papers published in General Biomedical Research in 2011. The respective three most tweeted (A) and read (B) papers are labeled showing the first author. All values were increased by 1 to include all data points in the logarithmic representation.

 Figure A2: Scatterplot of number of citations and number of tweets (A, ρ=0.074**) and Mendeley readers (B, ρ=0.351**) for papers published in Public Health in 2011. The respective three most tweeted (A) and read (B) papers are labeled showing the first author. All values were increased by 1 to include all data points in the logarithmic representation.