Investigating the effect of Altmetrics index of ResearchGate social network on research activities of Iranian authors and researchers in the field of nursing in databases

The aim of this study was to identify the effect of Altmetrics indexes of ResearchGate social network on scientometric indicators of Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar citation databases.

The present study is an applied research and descriptive-survey research that has been done by the scientometric method with the Altmetrics approach. The statistical population of the study includes Iranian researchers and writers in the field of nursing who in the period 2000-2019 and on the date of research (20/03/2020), had an indexed document in the Scopus citation database and also a member of the scientific social network ResearchGate. They were. The statistical sample of the study includes 158 high-profile authors introduced by Scopus. In addition to descriptive statistics, in the inferential statistics section, the correlation test between the studied indices has been used with the help of SPSS and Excel software.

The research findings show that there is a significant relationship between most of the ResearchGate indices and the indices studied in Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. But there is no significant relationship between the index of followers with H-index indexes and citations received in Scopus and Web of Science databases. Examining the relationship between the number of citations received in Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science databases shows that there is a significant relationship between the number of citations received in Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases.