Comprehensive Examination of Novel Altmetrics Data in Relation to Citation Based Impact: A Case Study in the Field of Information Sciences
For a long time, the scholarly impact of a researcher has been evaluated by its citation and publication count. As social media becomes a vital part of our lives, scholars use “Altmetrics” platforms to promote their publications through the use of different social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, CUL (Cite You Like), Mendeley, etc. Twitter is one of the popular and rapidly growing microblogging platforms that is also used in the context of “Altmetrics” as a strong alternative scale to identify quality research work. This research test whether Twitter indicators are helpful to identify quality research work. Our research is based upon a small dataset of 6613 tweets in the field of natural sciences. We compared Twitter indicators (“favorite count and retweet count”) vs. traditional indicator (“citation count”). We also analyzed Twitter text (comments) based on sentiment analysis by using different algorithms. Our research came up with the outcome that neither the favorite count, retweet count, nor the comments were the strong indicators to identify quality research work. These results would help the researchers to understand the role of Twitter indicators to capture quality research work online. Keywords: Altmetrics, Twitter Indicators, Sentiment Analysis, Microblogging