Altmetrics and its importance in evaluating the scientific researches: A practical study

Abstract

This study identifies the meaning of altmetrics and the conditions of its creation and its importance in the evaluation of scientific research. It also explains the usage of Mendeley applications as one of the programs that provide alternative measurement methods by which intellectual production could be evaluated. As well as providing a quick overview of the most important tools those are used to evaluate scientific resources through ProQuest databases. It discusses the numerical and qualitative characteristics of the Altmetrics literature that were collected through ProQuest databases and the publication which being shared between researchers specialized in the field of Altmetrics who are participants of Mendeley. It also applies the altmetrics tools to evaluate the distribution of these publications in the same field of Altmetrics , which rely on readership statistics that has been provided by Mendeley program , and it uses the citation statistics provided through ProQuestto evaluate these publication. It compares the differences of using some altmetrics tools to evaluate these publications. The results showed some relationship between using Readership Statistics and the number of citations means, which provide evidence of the importance of using such alternative standards (altmetrics) for evaluating scientific research.
The bibliometric methods were applied in this study to provide a analysis of the numerical and qualitative characteristics of the altmetrics literature. Also the comparative approach was applied to show differences between the tools used to evaluate the researches of the field of altmetrics , which has been confined in each of Mendeley databases, and ProQuest, as well , to demonstrate the similarities and differences between the collection of publication in the field.
Through the numerical features and quality distribution of the publication collected about altmetrics through ProQuest and Mandely databases ; it turned out to be relatively different on the total number of works published in the field, the databases of ProQuest held (413) items while Mendeley databases held (803)item after excluding some of some dublicated titles in Mendeley . It also shows that the resources in that field were well shared and distributed among readers or researchers of this field.
The results of the evaluation of these publications using altmetrics tools showed that the statistics of the total number of readers on Mendely may not be true due to some mistakes in bibliographic data that caused duplication of some titles entered by participants. These mistakes should be detected by the Mendely team of programmers who must also unify the bibliographic data which are made by the users of Mendely and check for errors. These errors could be in titles or date as well as the keywords used for indexing in their databases.
However the Readership Statistics of Mendeley provides many useful information that certainly affect the importance of the research works, in particular, it helps to explain its value in the field, and allows researchers from different disciplines to identify search trends in these different disciplines, it provides a possibilities of cooperation between these researchers around the world, and allows identification of the most importance statistics of their own works from peer reviewers or comments of its readers.
Finally this study provides evidence that altmetrics have become an essential way to analyze and evaluate scientific literature, and it not a substitute for the old bibliometrics that depend on the number of citation only to measure the value of scientific researches .