Evaluating the Factors Affecting Scholarly Communication of Journal Articles on Social and News Media: An Altmetric Study

Abstract

Different factors influence the altmetric attentions for scholarly articles on social media. This study aimed to evaluate the effecting factors on altmetric coverage of journals in non-English-speaking countries. Using a total population sampling technique, we included all Iranian and Turkish journals published from 2016 to 2019. Altmetric data were collected from altmetric.com using an application programming interface, for the coverage of mentions aggregated by the journal articles on Twitter, Facebook, and news media. The correlations between the languages, field of study, Google PageRank (GPR) score, and availability of a ‘share button’ with mentions were calculated using non-parametric tests. Among all articles, 2,378 articles were scholarly communicated on social media, and there were 7,191 mentions in the evaluated platforms. The scholarly publication of Iran and Turkey differed greatly concerning the subject matter. However, Twitter ranked first among the highly used alternative metrics for scholarly communication in both countries. The number of mentions for English journals was higher than for bilingual ones. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between the GPR and the coverage of mentions on Twitter and news media.