Comparing the Citations Counts and Altmetrics of the Top Medical Science Journals in Scopus

Early altmetric investigations have focused on measuring the correlations between citation and altmetrics to partially validate the new metrics articles (Thelwall, Haustein, Larivière, & Sugimoto, 2013; Priem, & Hemminger, 2010; Costas, Zahedi, & Wouters, 2014). The main aim of this research is to study the relationship between citation count indicator and almetrics or the new metrics in social -web of medical sciences journals. Present research is an applied research and the method used for doing it, is descriptive from correlation type which test relationship between citation count indicators and almetrics or the new metrics in social web. 111 medical sciences journals which have the highest SJR in Scopus databases were selected as research population from Scimago Journal Ranking (SJR) 2013-2014. Altmetrics—alternative metrics usually based on data from the social web which could be seen as a particularly promising approach in efforts to find appropriate measures for assessing Medical Science Journals were extracted through altmetrics.com. Research results show that there is significant correlation between Medical science journals altmetrics tools like F1000, Mention, Facebook, and News and their citation Numbers. There is no significant correlation between Medical science journals altmetrics tools like Reddit, Blog posts, Google plus, Tweets and their citation numbers. Structural equation modeling also shows the same results.