Measuring Research Impact of Library and Information Science Journals: Citation verses Altmetrics

Abstract

Since the development of web 2.0, there has been a paradigm shift in methods of knowledge sharing. This has equally impacted on techniques of research evaluation. Many scholars have argued that the social utilization of research is hardly reflected in the traditional methods of research evaluation. This study is an attempt to contribute to this discussion with focus on the field of library and information science. The study extracted citation data from Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar, and altmetric attentions from 85 LIS journals indexed by Web of Science. Further, eighteen journals with high altmetric attention were identified, while nine of the journals maintained consistent presence in the three databases used. Of the three databases, citation data from Google scholar had a high correlation with altmetric attention of the 85 LIS journals while the other two databases maintained moderate correlations with altmetric attention of the journals. The study also found a positive correlation between citation scores and altmetric attention of the nine journals that maintained consistent presence in the three databases.