Usefulness of altmetrics for measuring the broader impact of research: A case study using data from PLOS and F1000Prime

Purpose: The present case study investigates the usefulness of altmetrics for measuring the broad impact of research.

Methods: This case study is based on a sample of 1,082 PLOS (the Public Library of Science) journal articles recommended in F1000. The dataset includes altmetrics which were provided by PLOS. The F1000 dataset contains tags on papers which were assigned by experts to characterise them.

Findings: Results from the Facebook and Twitter models show higher predicted numbers of counts for "good for teaching" papers than for those papers where the tag is not set. Further model estimations show that saves by Mendeley users are particularly to be expected when a paper introduces a new practical/ theoretical technique (tag: "technical advance"). The tag "New finding" is statistically significant in the model with which the Facebook counts are evaluated.

Conclusions: The "good for teaching" is assigned to papers which could be of interest to a wider circle of readers than the peers in a specialized area. Thus, the results of the current study indicate that Facebook and Twitter, but not Figshare or Mendeley, might provide an indication of which papers are of interest to a broader circle of readers (and not only for the peers in a specialist area), and could therefore be useful for the measurement of the social impact of research.