The Presence of Iranian Information Science and Library Science Articles in Social Media: An Altmetric Study

The main objective of the paper is to study the presence of Iranian Information Science & Library Science articles in social media websites and tools. Articles with the highest altmetric scores will be identified and the association between altmetric and citation indicators will be investigated.
This study is an applied research using altmetric data. A total of 563 articles in the area of Information Science & Library Science which specified Iran as their affiliated country and indexed by the Thomson Reuters until the end of 2014, were selected as the population of study. The altmetric bookmarklet, a service provided by Altmetric Institute was used for data collection. Statistical analysis and visualization was conducted using R statistical computing software.
Out of 563 Iranian IS & LS articles, 72 papers (12.8%) were mentioned at least once in different social media. Twitter (80.55%) stands out as the most promising altmetric source for Iranian IS & LS papers, followed by Mendeley (77.77%) and CiteULike (22.22%). Studying the share of IS & LS papers with altmetric indicators across publication years show that papers published in 2014 have the highest proportion (30%). The results of running a Spearman correlation test revealed statistically significant but moderate relationships between Mendeley and CiteULike readership counts and number of citations in Web of Science.
Altmetric indicators, indices based on activity in social media environments, have the potential to measure scientific impact of researchers beside other scientometric indicators.