An Assessment of Altmetrics Indicators on Citation Rate of Articles Affiliated by Guilan University of Medical Sciences

Altmetrics is a new concept retrieved from citation indicators based on Web 2.0 that can evaluate all academic outputs. This descriptive survey aimed to compare the citation rate of academic articles affiliated by Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Iran, in two social scientific networks.
The recent study was descriptive applied research carried based on scietometric approach. All of the academic articles with affiliation of Guilan University of Medical Sciences indexed in Scopus from 1997 to 2015 (845 articles) were chosen. Then, the citation rates of articles with details of indicators in two scientific social networks, ResearchGate and Mendeley were followed. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS software, through analytical statistic tests such as Student-t and Pearson Correlation Coefficient testss. The significant level was less than 0.05 in this study (P All of 845 academic papers were cited 3199 times in Scopus database until 2015. The citation rate in ResearchGate (87%) was more than the citation rate in Mendeley (52%). There was a positive significant correlation between citation rate of articles, observation rate and download rate of articles in ResaerchGate. In addition, there was a positive significant correlation between citation rates with reading frequency of articles in Mendeley (P According to the results, the ResearchGate and Mendeley scientific networks have more impact on increasing the amount of download and as a result, the citation rate of articles. Therefore, researchers in medical sciences can use these networks as a "search for information" and "self-archive" for the purpose of greater use and citation of their scientific activities.