Investigating Social Media as alternative or Complementary Tools for evaluation of Iranian Scholars

Similar to citation databases, social networks can be used to measure document and article use; therefore, the aim of this research is to investigate the social media or networks as tools for evaluation of scholars.
The Altmetrics method _ measures based on social media or network_ was used for the survey. A sample of 309 facultly members affiliated to the University of Tehran were surveyed in order to find their publications on Scopus and their social records on bookmarking websites of CiteULike, Bibsonomy and Mendeley. The data were analyzed using Excel and SPSS software.
Findings: Research findings demonstrated that there is significant correlation between citations and social bookmark records of Iranian scholar's publication. The highest correlation is between Mendeley and Scopus at ρ=0.80. The correlation between CiteULike and Scopus is low (ρ=0.439) while that for Bibsonomy is very low (ρ=.0241).
Results show that Mendeley can be used as alternative or complementary tool for evaluation of the scholars.