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Tracing the Visibility of Swedish LIS Research Articles by Using Altmetrics

Scholarly impact and visibility have traditionally been assessed by estimating the number and quality of publications and citations in the scholarly literature. But now scholars are increasingly visible on the Web. Twitter, Mendeley and other social media platforms are quite well-known and interesting tools for sharing research articles among scholars. Based on the capabilities of altmetrics, this thesis analyses the altmetric coverage and impact of LIS articles published by Swedish universities during 2013 to 2017. It also tries to paint a picture of demographic of people engaged with these articles. The most common altmetric sources are considered using a sample of 170 LIS journal articles. The findings were interpreted using two different sociological theories: the normative theory of Merton´s norms and the theory of social constructivism. The result of the study showed that Mendeley has the highest coverage of journal articles (65 percent) followed by Twitter (33 percent) while very few of the publications are mentioned in blogs or on Facebook. Researchers were the main Mendeley readers of articles with 53 percent, followed by the general public at 26 percent. This study, on the other hand, found out that public users were the main group that shared articles on Twitter. The list of articles with a high number of tweets showed that most topics in the field of LIS are associated with bibliometrics and citation impacts. The results demonstrate that the adoption of altmetric methods within the LIS fields is inevitable, but several issues must be considered to identify their potential.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hb-15996
Date January 2018
CreatorsAbbasi, Sahar
PublisherHögskolan i Borås, Akademin för bibliotek, information, pedagogik och IT
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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