Tracing The Scholarly Footprints of Digital Humanities: A Comparative Study on Citations and Altmetric Attention

Digital humanities (DH) as a new research area attracted the attention of researchers all over the globe. The present study attempts to trace the penetration of DH research through social media platforms and their impact on traditional citation scores. 3765 documents with "digital humanities" as the keyword, retrieved from Scopus database were analyzed. Almetrics data was collected using the Altmetric Explorer. 44.8 percent of the total DH publications are mentioned at least once in any of the social media platforms. The number of publications in DH with social attention shows a steady increase. Using the Spearman’s correlation test it was found that Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) have a moderately positive correlation with Dimensions (rho=.280) and Scopus (rho=.265) citation. This indicates that higher social media mentions on DH publications are associated with a good number of citation counts. Mendeley readership (36555) and twitter (11172) are the top intakes of DH literature. Green open access DH literature attracted highest altmetric attention score (3088). The altmetric attention advantage of open access DH literature was tested. Mann Whitney U test showed that the mean rank of citation counts for open access publications (469.54) is higher than that of closed access publications (378.80). The result is statistically significant (p-value=.000). We recommend that authors and researchers in digital humanities may use open access publication platforms to improve the visibility and citation potential of publications.