A longitudinal study of the bookmarking of library and information science literature in Mendeley

摘要

Speed and breadth have been suggested as two advantages of altmetrics over citation counts since they might estimate impact immediately after publication and beyond the academic community of authors. In order to investigate the validity of these claims, we performed a fifteen-month longitudinal study of the evolution of bookmarks in Mendeley for a set of 3813 articles published in Library and Information Science in 2014. Results show that 87.6% of the literature was bookmarked at least once by May 2016 whereas only 55% was cited. The correlation between bookmarks and citations was moderate and the overlap between the most frequently bookmarked and the most frequently cited papers increased over time. A significant share of the bookmarks were made by students and professionals, although the shares of bookmarks made by different categories of users changed as time went by. Bookmarks made by users based in less wealthy nations also increased over time. The study is limited by the incomplete information provided by Mendeley regarding users' academic status and country of residence, the upgrades of the software used in data collection, and the fact that one year is a rather long publication period for a longitudinal study of a fast changing feature like bookmarks. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.