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#Psychology: a bibliometric analysis of psychological literature in the online media

Author

Listed:
  • Sebastian Vogl

    (University of Salzburg)

  • Thomas Scherndl

    (University of Salzburg)

  • Anton Kühberger

    (University of Salzburg
    University of Salzburg)

Abstract

Online media and especially social media are becoming more and more relevant to our everyday life. Reflecting this tendency in the scientific community, alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact on the web are increasingly proposed, extending (or even replacing) traditional metrics (e.g., citations, journal impact factor, etc.). This paper explores the relationship between traditional metrics and alternative metrics for psychological research in the years from 2010 to 2012. Traditional publication metrics (e.g., number of citations, impact factor) and alternative metrics (collected from Altmetric, a website that collects and counts references as they appear in Wikipedia, public policy documents, research blogs, mainstream media, or social networks) were extracted and compared, using a dataset of over 245,000 publications from the Web of Science. Results show positive, small to medium, correlations on the level of individual publications, and frequently medium to high correlations on the level of research fields of Psychology. The more accumulated the level of analysis, the higher the correlations. These findings are fairly robust over time and comparable to findings from research areas other than Psychology. Additionally, a new metric, the Score Factor, is proposed as a useful alternative metric to assess a journal’s impact in the online media.

Suggested Citation

  • Sebastian Vogl & Thomas Scherndl & Anton Kühberger, 2018. "#Psychology: a bibliometric analysis of psychological literature in the online media," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(3), pages 1253-1269, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:115:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-018-2727-5
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-018-2727-5
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Mousumi Karmakar & Sumit Kumar Banshal & Vivek Kumar Singh, 2020. "Does presence of social media plugins in a journal website result in higher social media attention of its research publications?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(3), pages 2103-2143, September.
    2. Banshal, Sumit Kumar & Gupta, Solanki & Lathabai, Hiran H & Singh, Vivek Kumar, 2022. "Power Laws in altmetrics: An empirical analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(3).
    3. Sergio Copiello, 2020. "Other than detecting impact in advance, alternative metrics could act as early warning signs of retractions: tentative findings of a study into the papers retracted by PLoS ONE," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2449-2469, December.
    4. Andrés Fernández-Ramos & Blanca Rodríguez-Bravo & Ángela Diez-Diez, 2023. "Use of scientific journals in Spanish universities: analysis of the relationship between citations and downloads in two university library consortia," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(4), pages 2489-2505, April.

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