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How Much Research Output from India Gets Social Media Attention?


Affiliations
1 Department of Computer Science, South Asian University, New Delhi 110 021,, India
2 Department of Computer Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi 221 005, India
3 GESIS Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany
 

Scholarly articles are now increasingly being mentioned and discussed in social media platforms, sometimes even as pre- or post-print version uploads. Measures of social media mentions and coverage are now emerging as an alternative indicator of impact of scholarly articles. This article aims to explore how much scholarly research output from India is covered in different social media platforms, and how similar or different it is from the world average. It also analyses the disciplinewise variations in coverage and altmetric attention for Indian research output, including a comparison with the world average. Results obtained show interesting patterns. Only 28.5% of the total research output from India is covered in social media platforms, which is about 18% less than the world average. ResearchGate and Mendeley are the most popular social media platforms in India for scholarly article coverage. In terms of discipline-wise variation, medical sciences and biological sciences have relatively higher coverage across different platforms compared to disciplines like information science and engineering.

Keywords

Disciplinary Variation, Research Output, Scholarly Articles, Social Media.
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  • How Much Research Output from India Gets Social Media Attention?

Abstract Views: 370  |  PDF Views: 143

Authors

Sumit Kumar Banshal
Department of Computer Science, South Asian University, New Delhi 110 021,, India
Vivek Kumar Singh
Department of Computer Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi 221 005, India
Pranab K. Muhuri
Department of Computer Science, South Asian University, New Delhi 110 021,, India
Philipp Mayr
GESIS Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany

Abstract


Scholarly articles are now increasingly being mentioned and discussed in social media platforms, sometimes even as pre- or post-print version uploads. Measures of social media mentions and coverage are now emerging as an alternative indicator of impact of scholarly articles. This article aims to explore how much scholarly research output from India is covered in different social media platforms, and how similar or different it is from the world average. It also analyses the disciplinewise variations in coverage and altmetric attention for Indian research output, including a comparison with the world average. Results obtained show interesting patterns. Only 28.5% of the total research output from India is covered in social media platforms, which is about 18% less than the world average. ResearchGate and Mendeley are the most popular social media platforms in India for scholarly article coverage. In terms of discipline-wise variation, medical sciences and biological sciences have relatively higher coverage across different platforms compared to disciplines like information science and engineering.

Keywords


Disciplinary Variation, Research Output, Scholarly Articles, Social Media.

References





DOI: https://doi.org/10.18520/cs%2Fv117%2Fi5%2F753-760