Analyzing altmetrics and their relationship with citations for conference and review papers: a study of Indian physics research

Purpose The purpose of the present study is to, first of all, analyze the coverage of publications in Physics in the span of five years (2014–2018) having at least one author from an Indian institution in various sources of altmetrics. The second purpose of the study is to analyze the relationship between citations and altmetrics. Correlations between publications having at least one mention in a source of altmetrics and at least one citation have also been carried out. The study attempts to investigate if altmetrics can be used for research evaluation. Design/methodology/approach In the present study, the coverage of conference and review papers in Physics having at least one author from an Indian Institution published during 2014–2018 in various sources of altmetrics and the relationship between altmetrics and citation counts have been carried out. Scopus and Altmetric.com have been used for collecting citation and altmetrics data, respectively. The study analyzes the data for the measures of central tendencies and evaluates if the altmetrics differ considerably from citations. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient was calculated between altmetrics and citations for analyzing the relationship between them. Findings The highest coverage of both conference papers (2.14%) and review papers (22.79%) was found for Twitter. The coverage in the rest of the sources tracked by Altmetric.com was found to be less than 1% for conference papers and less than 7% for review papers. The average Twitter mentions for conference papers tweeted at least once was found to be 2.18 whereas for review papers, it was 7.67. Average Facebook mentions were found to be 1.2 (conference papers) and 1.88 (review papers). The novel Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) developed by Altmetric.com was also analyzed in the study. Spearman's rank correlation coefficients between Twitter mentions-citations, Facebook mentions-citations and AAS-citations were found to be statistically significant but low to week positive. Research limitations/implications The implications of the findings of the study comes to the conclusion that altmetrics should be utilized with caution as a supplementary tool for research evaluation in conjunction with citation-based metrics because of the low coverage of publications in platforms that generate altmetrics. Originality/value The present study deals with the measure of research impact of conference papers and review papers in Physics having at least one author from an Indian institution published during 2014–2018. The study is unique as most of the studies focussed on altmetrics are on journal articles. It is one of the first large scale altmetric studies dealing with Physics research. Also, Indian research has not been explored in the altmetrics literature.