Validating online reference managers for scholarly impact measurement

  • Authors:

  • Xuemei Li;Mike Thelwall;Dean Giustini

  • Affiliations:

  • Peter F. Bronfman Library, York University, Toronto, Canada M3J 1P3;Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, School of Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK WV1 1LY;Biomedical Branch Library, Gordon and Leslie Diamond Health Care Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada BC V5Z 1M9

  • Venue:
  • Scientometrics
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

This paper investigates whether CiteULike and Mendeley are useful for measuring scholarly influence, using a sample of 1,613 papers published in Nature and Science in 2007. Traditional citation counts from the Web of Science (WoS) were used as benchmarks to compare with the number of users who bookmarked the articles in one of the two free online reference manager sites. Statistically significant correlations were found between the user counts and the corresponding WoS citation counts, suggesting that this type of influence is related in some way to traditional citation-based scholarly impact but the number of users of these systems seems to be still too small for them to challenge traditional citation indexes.