Where and how knowledge on digital library evaluation spreads: a case study on conference literature
Papachristopoulos, Leonidas
Mitrelis, Angelos
Tsakonas, Giannis
Papatheodorou, Christos
Παπαχριστόπουλος, Λεωνίδας
Τσάκωνας, Γιάννης
Παπαθεοδώρου, Χρήστος
Μητρέλης, Άγγελος
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Scholarly communication has not remained unaffected by the advance of the social networking culture. The traditional bibliometric paradigm is strongly questioned as a tool that accurately portrays the impact of research outcomes. New metrics, such as download or view rates and shares, have been proposed as alternative ways for measuring the impact of digital content published in the form of articles, datasets, etc. Mendeley's Readership Statistics are one of these metrics, based on the assumption that there is a linkage between a paper in a collection and the interests of collection owner. The current study explores the “altmetric” aspects of the literature of the Digital Libraries Evaluation domain, as it is expressed in two major conferences of the field, namely JCDL and ECDL. Our corpus consists of 224 papers, for which we extract readership data from Mendeley and examine in how many collections these papers belong to. Our goal is to investigate whether readership statistics can help us to understand where and to whom DL evaluation research has impact. Therefore the data are analyzed statistically to produce indicators of geographical, and topical distribution of Mendeley Readers as well as to explore and classify their their profession. Finally it derived that there is a loose correlation between the number of Google Scholar citations and the number of Mendeley readers.
