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Although social media plays an increasingly important role in communication around the world, social media research has primarily focused on Western users. Thus, little is known about how cultural values shape social media behavior. To examine how cultural affective values might influence social media use, we developed a new sentiment analysis tool that allowed us to compare the affective content of Twitter posts in the United States (55,867 tweets, 1,888 users) and Japan (63,863 tweets, 1,825 users). Consistent with their respective cultural affective values, U.S. users primarily produced positive (vs. negative) posts, whereas Japanese users primarily produced low (vs. high) arousal posts. Contrary to cultural affective values, however, U.S. users were more influenced by changes in others' high arousal negative (e.g., angry) posts, whereas Japanese were more influenced by changes in others' high arousal positive (e.g., excited) posts. These patterns held after controlling for differences in baseline exposure to affective content, and across different topics. Together, these results suggest that across cultures, while social media users primarily produce content that supports their affective values, they are more influenced by content that violates those values. These findings have implications for theories about which affective content spreads on social media, and for applications related to the optimal design and use of social media platforms around the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Promoting health-related campaigns on Twitter has increasingly become a world-wide choice to raise awareness and disseminate health information. Data retrieved from Twitter are now being used to explore how users express their views, attitudes and personal experiences of health-related issues. We focused on Twitter discourse reproduced during Mental Health Awareness Week 2017 by examining 1,200 tweets containing the keywords 'mental health', 'mental illness', 'mental disorders' and '#MHAW'. The analysis revealed 'awareness and advocacy', 'stigmatization', and 'personal experience of mental health/illness' as the central discourses within the sample. The article concludes with some recommendations for future research on digitally-mediated health communication.

Although counts of tweets citing academic papers are used as an informal indicator of interest, little is known about who tweets academic papers and who uses Twitter to find scholarly information. Without knowing this, it is difficult to draw useful conclusions from a publication being frequently tweeted. This study surveyed 1,912 users that have tweeted journal articles to ask about their scholarly-related Twitter uses. Almost half of the respondents (45%) did not work in academia, despite the sample probably being biased towards academics. Twitter was used most by people with a social science or humanities background. People tend to leverage social ties on Twitter to find information rather than searching for relevant tweets. Twitter is used in academia to acquire and share real-time information and to develop connections with others. Motivations for using Twitter vary by discipline, occupation, and employment sector, but not much by gender. These factors also influence the sharing of different types of academic information. This study provides evidence that Twitter plays a significant role in the discovery of scholarly information and cross-disciplinary knowledge spreading. Most importantly, the large numbers of non-academic users support the claims of those using tweet counts as evidence for the non-academic impacts of scholarly research., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have reported medium correlations between specific altmetrics and citation rates for individual journals or fields. To fill this gap, this study compares 11 altmetrics with Web of Science citations for 76 to 208,739 PubMed articles with at least one altmetric mention in each case and up to 1,891 journals per metric. It also introduces a simple sign test to overcome biases caused by different citation and usage windows. Statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and higher citations for articles with positive altmetric scores in all cases with sufficient evidence (Twitter, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blogs, mainstream media and forums) except perhaps for Google+ posts. Evidence was insufficient for LinkedIn, Pinterest, question and answer sites, and Reddit, and no conclusions should be drawn about articles with zero altmetric scores or the strength of any correlation between altmetrics and citations. Nevertheless, comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles. Finally, the coverage of all the altmetrics except for Twitter seems to be low and so it is not clear if they are prevalent enough to be useful in practice.

Victims of bullying are often reluctant to seek formal support, and instead, internalise their emotions, hindering recovery. Some will subsequently encounter discussions of bullying online, giving them an unexpected opportunity to share their feelings or experience vicarious support. In this article, we investigate reactions to discussions of offline and online bullying in the comments posted to the YouTube channels of 34 popular UK female lifestyle influencers. We used a thematic analysis of keywords associated with comments mentioning bullying to identify bullying-related themes. The almost universally supportive comments position female YouTube influencer channels as sources of unexpected indirect support for victims that professionals may also recommend. The comments also reveal a previously undiscussed strategy for helping victims: abstraction.

The need to elicit public opinion about predefined topics is widespread in the social sciences, government and business. Traditional survey-based methods are being partly replaced by social media data mining but their potential and limitations are poorly understood. This article investigates this issue by introducing and critically evaluating a systematic social media analytics strategy to gain insights about a topic from YouTube. The results of an investigation into sets of dance style videos show that it is possible to identify plausible patterns of subtopic difference, gender and sentiment. The analysis also points to the generic limitations of social media analytics that derive from their fundamentally exploratory multi-method nature.

New Year's resolutions are acts of valuation where people express ideas about what is important and worthwhile in life. Although resolutions have a long history, the twenty-first century has transformed the practice into a social media ritual with greater visibility, interactivity, and reach. Using this unique event to explore the globalization of values, we analyze tweets about New Year's resolutions in English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. Combining network analysis (n = 160,592) and content analysis (n = 2000), we compare discursive topics, modes of ritual participation, and the values expressed in resolutions. Our findings indicate both that the ritual crosses cultures and that there are language-specific dynamics that do not map neatly onto established divisions between 'Eastern' and 'Western' value orientations. Instead, we identify three underlying tensions organizing the articulation of values: self-acceptance vs. self-improvement, public vs. private, and conformity vs. oppositionality. We discuss these in relation to an overarching tension between local contexts and global platform cultures. Finally, we explore the study's broader implications for understanding the interaction between values, norms, and global communicative practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates changing levels of online concern about the Kashmiri Pandit migration of the 1990s on Twitter. Although decades old, this movement of people is an ongoing issue in India, with no current resolution. Analysing changing reactions to it on social media may shed light on trends in public attitudes to the event. Tweets were downloaded from Twitter using the academic version of its application programming interface (API) with the aid of the free social media analytics software Mozdeh. A set of 1000 tweets was selected for content analysis with a random number generator in Mozdeh. The results show that the number of tweets about the issue has increased over time, mainly from India, and predominantly driven by the release of films like Shikara and The Kashmir Files. The tweets show apparent universal support for the Pandits but often express strong emotions or criticize the actions of politicians, showing that the migration is an ongoing source of anguish and frustration that needs resolution. The results also show that social media analysis can give insights even into primarily offline political issues that predate the popularity of the web, and can easily incorporate international perspectives necessary to understand complex migration issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3 Methods The research design was to obtain a large sample of popular UK female YouTube lifestyle influencers and obtain statistical evidence of their popularity and the popularity of their videos from YouTube, in addition to you pronoun proportion data for each for their videos. Qual1: manually examine videos with high you pronoun proportions despite not having high scores on H2, H3, and H4 for possible additional video sPSI potential factors (if H1 is accepted). Keywords: Parasocial interaction; Parasocial relationships; Influencers; YouTube; Social media; semi-PSI EN Parasocial interaction Parasocial relationships Influencers YouTube Social media semi-PSI 31 56 26 04/28/22 20220401 NES 220401 1 Introduction Online videos are an important source of information and entertainment for a substantial minority of the world. 4.3 PSI exception videos (Qual1) A qualitative examination of the high you videos that did not have the typical sPSI potential factors suggested that content focusing on the channel itself or requesting viewer feedback may generate strong semi-PSIs, or at least a high proportion of you pronoun comments. [Extracted from the article]

As one of the world's most visited websites, YouTube is potentially influential for learning gendered attitudes. Nevertheless, despite evidence of gender influences within the site for some topics, the extent to which YouTube reflects or promotes male/female or other gender divides is unknown. This article analyses 10,211 YouTube videos published in 12 months from 2014 to 2015 using commenter‐portrayed genders (inferred from usernames) and view counts from the end of 2019. Nonbinary genders are omitted for methodological reasons. Although there were highly male and female topics or themes (e.g., vehicles or beauty) and male or female gendering is the norm, videos with topics attracting both males and females tended to have more viewers (after approximately 5 years) than videos in male or female gendered topics. Similarly, within each topic, videos with gender balanced sets of commenters tend to attract more viewers. Thus, YouTube does not seem to be driving male–female gender differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy seems likely to increase mortality rates and delay the easing of social distancing restrictions. Online platforms with large audiences may influence vaccine hesitancy by spreading fear and misinformation that is avoided by the mainstream media. Understanding what types of vaccine hesitancy information is shared on the popular social web site Twitter may therefore help to design interventions to address misleading attitudes. This study applies content analysis to a random sample of 446 vaccine hesitant Covid-19 tweets in English posted between 10 March and 5 December 2020. The main themes discussed were conspiracies, vaccine development speed, and vaccine safety. Most (79%) of those tweeting refusal to take a vaccine expressed right-wing opinions, fear of a deep state, or conspiracy theories. A substantial minority of vaccine refusers (18%) mainly tweeted non-politically about other themes. The topics on Twitter reflect vaccine concerns, but those stating vaccine refusal in non-political contexts may unsettle the wider Twitter network by reaching outside right-wing areas of Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst representations of old age and older people in traditional media have been well documented, examinations of such representations within social media discourse are still scarce. This is an unfortunate omission because of the importance of social media for communication in contemporary society. In this study, we combine content analysis and discourse analysis to explore patterns of representation on Twitter around the terms ageing, old age, older people and elderly with a sample of 1,200 tweets. Our analysis shows that 'personal concerns/views' and 'health and social care' are the predominant overall topics, although some topics are clearly linked with specific keywords. The language often used in the tweets seems to reinforce negative discourses of age and ageing that locate older adults as a disempowered, vulnerable and homogeneous group; old age is deemed a problem and ageing is considered something that needs to be resisted, slowed or disguised. These topics and discursive patterns are indeed similar to those found in empirical studies of social perceptions and traditional media portrayal of old age, which indicates that social media and Twitter in particular appears to serve as an online platform that reproduces and reinforces existing ageist discourses in traditional media that feed into social perceptions of ageing and older people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Covid-19 pandemic is a global threat to health that few can fully escape, it has provided a unique opportunity to study international reactions to a common problem. Such reactions can be partly obtained from public posts to Twitter, allowing investigations of changes in interest over time. This study analysed English-language Covid-19 tweets mentioning cures, treatments, or vaccines from 1 January 2020 to 8 April 2021, seeking trends and international differences. The results have methodological limitations but show a tendency for countries with a lower human development index score to tweet more about cures, although they were a minor topic for all countries. Vaccines were discussed about as much as treatments until July 2020, when they generated more interest because of developments in Russia. The November 2020 Pfizer-BioNTech preliminary Phase 3 trials results generated an immediate and sustained sharp increase, however, followed by a continuing roughly linear increase in interest for vaccines until at least April 2021. Against this background, national deviations from the average were triggered by country-specific news about cures, treatments, or vaccines. Nevertheless, interest in vaccines in all countries increased in parallel to some extent, despite substantial international differences in national regulatory approval and availability. The results also highlight that unsubstantiated claims about alternative medicine remedies gained traction in several countries, apparently posing a threat to public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy seems likely to increase mortality rates and delay the easing of social distancing restrictions. Online platforms with large audiences may influence vaccine hesitancy by spreading fear and misinformation that is avoided by the mainstream media. Understanding what types of vaccine hesitancy information is shared on the popular social web site Twitter may therefore help to design interventions to address misleading attitudes. This study applies content analysis to a random sample of 446 vaccine hesitant Covid-19 tweets in English posted between 10 March and 5 December 2020. The main themes discussed were conspiracies, vaccine development speed, and vaccine safety. Most (79%) of those tweeting refusal to take a vaccine expressed right-wing opinions, fear of a deep state, or conspiracy theories. A substantial minority of vaccine refusers (18%) mainly tweeted non-politically about other themes. The topics on Twitter reflect vaccine concerns, but those stating vaccine refusal in non-political contexts may unsettle the wider Twitter network by reaching outside right-wing areas of Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly uneven impacts on sectors of society. People with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to it and so it is important to understand both the disability perspective and the role of social media. This information may help to reduce the risk from the disease. In response, this article uses thematic analysis to investigate 59 disability-related tweets from March 10 to April 4, 2020 that were retweeted at least 500 times, with a quarter of a million retweets altogether. This approach generates quick insights into widely resonating disability-related issues. The results suggest the value of Twitter for disseminating information about the risk, offers or requests for support, the ability of many people with disabilities to adjust to the changes well, and information about individuals with the disease. In addition, there was outrage at suggestions that the disease was less serious because young people without disabilities were relatively low risk, and that people with disabilities might be denied equal access to medical treatment. As one tweet pointed out, people in less vulnerable categories should not be told on Twitter or elsewhere that the disease is less relevant to them because their actions can impact others through social spreading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atopic dermatitis or eczema affects a substantial minority of children and adults. Patients may treat their symptoms through skin care regimes, diet restrictions, and/or prescribed topical corticosteroids. The patient perspective is important because of the long-term self-administered treatment regime and the potential psychological effects on relationships from a visible disease. This article assesses the potential of public social media data to give new insights into patient perspectives through a thematic analysis of a random sample of 400 tweets from 2019 matching the query, "my eczema." Although the most common use of Twitter is to announce a flare-up, it is also used to express anger and discuss possible treatments. New themes not previously reported include the use of humor to discuss the condition and giving eczema agency: discussing it as if it had a will of its own. These may be defense strategies against the potential of eczema to strike at any time or the fear of negative reactions or blame from friends. This highlights the importance of nurses and others helping patients to deal with the psychological effects of eczema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The web is central to the work and social lives of a substantial fraction of the world's population, but the role of popular websites may not always be subject to academic scrutiny. This is a concern if social scientists are unable to understand an aspect of users' daily lives because one or more major websites have been ignored. To test whether popular websites may be ignored in academia, this article assesses the volume and citation impact of research mentioning any of twenty major websites. The results are consistent with the user geographic base affecting research interest and citation impact. In addition, site affordances that are useful for research also influence academic interest. Because of the latter factor, however, it is not possible to estimate the extent of academic knowledge about a site from the number of publications that mention it. Nevertheless, the virtual absence of international research about some globally important Chinese and Russian websites is a serious limitation for those seeking to understand reasons for their web success, the markets they serve or the users that spend time on them. The sites investigated were Google, YouTube, Facebook, Baidu, Wikipedia, QQ, Tmall, Taobao, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, Sohu, Live, VK, JD, Instagram, Sina, Weibo, Yandex, and 360. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SteemIt is a Reddit-like social news site that pays members for posting and curating content. It uses micropayments backed by a tradeable currency, exploiting the Bitcoin cryptocurrency generation model to finance content provision in conjunction with advertising. If successful, this paradigm might change the way in which volunteer-based sites operate. This article investigates 925,092 new members’ first posts for insights into what drives financial success in the site. Initial blog posts on average received US$0.01, although the maximum accrued was US$20,680.83. Longer, more sentiment-rich or more positive comments with personal information received the greatest financial reward in contrast to more informational or topical content. Thus, there is a clear financial value in starting with a friendly introduction rather than immediately attempting to provide useful content, despite the latter being the ultimate site goal. Follow-up posts also tended to be more successful when more personal, suggesting that interpersonal communication rather than quality content provision has driven the site so far. It remains to be seen whether the model of small typical rewards and the possibility that a post might generate substantially more are enough to incentivise long-term participation or a greater focus on informational posts in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counts of tweets and Mendeley user libraries have been proposed as altmetric alternatives to citation counts for the impact assessment of articles. Although both have been investigated to discover whether they correlate with article citations, it is not known whether users tend to tweet or save (in Mendeley) the same kinds of articles that they cite. In response, this article compares pairs of articles that are tweeted, saved to a Mendeley library, or cited by the same user, but possibly a different user for each source. The study analyzes 1,131,318 articles published in 2012, with minimum tweeted (10), saved to Mendeley (100), and cited (10) thresholds. The results show surprisingly minor overall overlaps between the three phenomena. The importance of journals for Twitter and the presence of many bots at different levels of activity suggest that this site has little value for impact altmetrics. The moderate differences between patterns of saving and citation suggest that Mendeley can be used for some types of impact assessments, but sensitivity is needed for underlying differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within science, citation counts are widely used to estimate research impact but publication delays mean that they are not useful for recent research. This gap can be filled by Mendeley reader counts, which are valuable early impact indicators for academic articles because they appear before citations and correlate strongly with them. Nevertheless, it is not known how Mendeley readership counts accumulate within the year of publication, and so it is unclear how soon they can be used. In response, this paper reports a longitudinal weekly study of the Mendeley readers of articles in 6 library and information science journals from 2016. The results suggest that Mendeley readers accrue from when articles are first available online and continue to steadily build. For journals with large publication delays, articles can already have substantial numbers of readers by their publication date. Thus, Mendeley reader counts may even be useful as early impact indicators for articles before they have been officially published in a journal issue. If field normalized indicators are needed, then these can be generated when journal issues are published using the online first date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although peer-review and citation counts are commonly used to help assess the scholarly impact of published research, informal reader feedback might also be exploited to help assess the wider impacts of books, such as their educational or cultural value. The social website Goodreads seems to be a reasonable source for this purpose because it includes a large number of book reviews and ratings by many users inside and outside of academia. To check this, Goodreads book metrics were compared with different book-based impact indicators for 15,928 academic books across broad fields. Goodreads engagements were numerous enough in the arts (85% of books had at least one), humanities (80%), and social sciences (67%) for use as a source of impact evidence. Low and moderate correlations between Goodreads book metrics and scholarly or non-scholarly indicators suggest that reader feedback in Goodreads reflects the many purposes of books rather than a single type of impact. Although Goodreads book metrics can be manipulated, they could be used guardedly by academics, authors, and publishers in evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SlideShare is a free social website that aims to help users distribute and find presentations. Owned by LinkedIn since 2012, it targets a professional audience but may give value to scholarship through creating a long-term record of the content of talks. This article tests this hypothesis by analyzing sets of general and scholarly related SlideShare documents using content and citation analysis and popularity statistics reported on the site. The results suggest that academics, students, and teachers are a minority of SlideShare uploaders, especially since 2010, with most documents not being directly related to scholarship or teaching. About two thirds of uploaded SlideShare documents are presentation slides, with the remainder often being files associated with presentations or video recordings of talks. SlideShare is therefore a presentation-centered site with a predominantly professional user base. Although a minority of the uploaded SlideShare documents are cited by, or cite, academic publications, probably too few articles are cited by SlideShare to consider extracting SlideShare citations for research evaluation. Nevertheless, scholars should consider SlideShare to be a potential source of academic and nonacademic information, particularly in library and information science, education, and business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many organizations use social media to attract supporters, disseminate information and advocate change. Services like Twitter can theoretically deliver messages to a huge audience that would be difficult to reach by other means. This article introduces a method to monitor an organization's Twitter strategy and applies it to tweets from United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) accounts. The Resonating Topic Method uses automatic analyses with free software to detect successful themes within the organization's tweets, categorizes the most successful tweets, and analyses a comparable organization to identify new successful strategies. In the case of UNDP tweets from November 2014 to March 2015, the results confirm the importance of official social media accounts as well as those of high profile individuals and general supporters. Official accounts seem to be more successful at encouraging action, which is a critical aspect of social media campaigning. An analysis of Oxfam found a successful social media approach that the UNDP had not adopted, showing the value of analyzing other organizations to find potential strategy gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goodreads is an Amazon-owned book-based social web site for members to share books, read, review books, rate books, and connect with other readers. Goodreads has tens of millions of book reviews, recommendations, and ratings that may help librarians and readers to select relevant books. This article describes a first investigation of the properties of Goodreads users, using a random sample of 50,000 members. The results suggest that about three quarters of members with a public profile are female, and that there is little difference between male and female users in patterns of behavior, except for females registering more books and rating them less positively. Goodreads librarians and super-users engage extensively with most features of the site. The absence of strong correlations between book-based and social usage statistics (e.g., numbers of friends, followers, books, reviews, and ratings) suggests that members choose their own individual balance of social and book activities and rarely ignore one at the expense of the other. Goodreads is therefore neither primarily a book-based website nor primarily a social network site but is a genuine hybrid, social navigation site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The large multidisciplinary academic social website ResearchGate aims to help academics to connect with each other and to publicize their work. Despite its popularity, little is known about the age and discipline of the articles uploaded and viewed in the site and whether publication statistics from the site could be useful impact indicators. In response, this article assesses samples of ResearchGate articles uploaded at specific dates, comparing their views in the site to their Mendeley readers and Scopus-indexed citations. This analysis shows that ResearchGate is dominated by recent articles, which attract about three times as many views as older articles. ResearchGate has uneven coverage of scholarship, with the arts and humanities, health professions, and decision sciences poorly represented and some fields receiving twice as many views per article as others. View counts for uploaded articles have low to moderate positive correlations with both Scopus citations and Mendeley readers, which is consistent with them tending to reflect a wider audience than Scopus-publishing scholars. Hence, for articles uploaded to the site, view counts may give a genuinely new audience indicator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientists and managers using citation-based indicators to help evaluate research cannot evaluate recent articles because of the time needed for citations to accrue. Reading occurs before citing, however, and so it makes sense to count readers rather than citations for recent publications. To assess this, Mendeley readers and citations were obtained for articles from 2004 to late 2014 in five broad categories (agriculture, business, decision science, pharmacy, and the social sciences) and 50 subcategories. In these areas, citation counts tended to increase with every extra year since publication, and readership counts tended to increase faster initially but then stabilize after about 5 years. The correlation between citations and readers was also higher for longer time periods, stabilizing after about 5 years. Although there were substantial differences between broad fields and smaller differences between subfields, the results confirm the value of Mendeley reader counts as early scientific impact indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter is used by a substantial minority of the populations of many countries to share short messages, sometimes including images. Nevertheless, despite some research into specific images, such as selfies, and a few news stories about specific tweeted photographs, little is known about the types of images that are routinely shared. In response, this article reports a content analysis of random samples of 800 images tweeted from the UK or USA during a week at the end of 2014. Although most images were photographs, a substantial minority were hybrid or layered image forms: phone screenshots, collages, captioned pictures, and pictures of text messages. About half were primarily of one or more people, including 10% that were selfies, but a wide variety of other things were also pictured. Some of the images were for advertising or to share a joke but in most cases the purpose of the tweet seemed to be to share the minutiae of daily lives, performing the function of chat or gossip, sometimes in innovative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biochemistry is a highly funded research area that is typified by large research teams and is important for many areas of the life sciences. This article investigates the citation impact and Mendeley readership impact of biochemistry research from 2011 in the Web of Science according to the type of collaboration involved. Negative binomial regression models are used that incorporate, for the first time, the inclusion of specific countries within a team. The results show that, holding other factors constant, larger teams robustly associate with higher impact research, but including additional departments has no effect and adding extra institutions tends to reduce the impact of research. Although international collaboration is apparently not advantageous in general, collaboration with the United States, and perhaps also with some other countries, seems to increase impact. In contrast, collaborations with some other nations seems to decrease impact, although both findings could be due to factors such as differing national proportions of excellent researchers. As a methodological implication, simpler statistical models would find international collaboration to be generally beneficial and so it is important to take into account specific countries when examining collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical research is highly funded and often expensive and so is particularly important to evaluate effectively. Nevertheless, citation counts may accrue too slowly for use in some formal and informal evaluations. It is therefore important to investigate whether alternative metrics could be used as substitutes. This article assesses whether one such altmetric, Mendeley readership counts, correlates strongly with citation counts across all medical fields, whether the relationship is stronger if student readers are excluded, and whether they are distributed similarly to citation counts. Based on a sample of 332,975 articles from 2009 in 45 medical fields in Scopus, citation counts correlated strongly (about 0.7; 78% of articles had at least one reader) with Mendeley readership counts (from the new version 1 applications programming interface [ API]) in almost all fields, with one minor exception, and the correlations tended to decrease slightly when student readers were excluded. Readership followed either a lognormal or a hooked power law distribution, whereas citations always followed a hooked power law, showing that the two may have underlying differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Mendeley bookmarking counts appear to correlate moderately with conventional citation metrics, it is not known whether academic publications are bookmarked in Mendeley in order to be read or not. Without this information, it is not possible to give a confident interpretation of altmetrics derived from Mendeley. In response, a survey of 860 Mendeley users shows that it is reasonable to use Mendeley bookmarking counts as an indication of readership because most (55%) users with a Mendeley library had read or intended to read at least half of their bookmarked publications. This was true across all broad areas of scholarship except for the arts and humanities (42%). About 85% of the respondents also declared that they bookmarked articles in Mendeley to cite them in their publications, but some also bookmark articles for use in professional (50%), teaching (25%), and educational activities (13%). Of course, it is likely that most readers do not record articles in Mendeley and so these data do not represent all readers. In conclusion, Mendeley bookmark counts seem to be indicators of readership leading to a combination of scholarly impact and wider professional impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a new source of evidence of the value of medical-related research: citations from clinical guidelines. These give evidence that research findings have been used to inform the day-to-day practice of medical staff. To identify whether citations from guidelines can give different information from that of traditional citation counts, this article assesses the extent to which references in clinical guidelines tend to be highly cited in the academic literature and highly read in Mendeley. Using evidence from the United Kingdom, references associated with the UK's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence ( NICE) guidelines tended to be substantially more cited than comparable articles, unless they had been published in the most recent 3 years. Citation counts also seemed to be stronger indicators than Mendeley readership altmetrics. Hence, although presence in guidelines may be particularly useful to highlight the contributions of recently published articles, for older articles citation counts may already be sufficient to recognize their contributions to health in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In theory, articles can attract readers on the social reference sharing site Mendeley before they can attract citations, so Mendeley altmetrics could provide early indications of article impact. This article investigates the influence of time on the number of Mendeley readers of an article through a theoretical discussion and an investigation into the relationship between counts of readers of, and citations to, 4 general library and information science (LIS) journals. For this discipline, it takes about 7 years for articles to attract as many Scopus citations as Mendeley readers, and after this the Spearman correlation between readers and citers is stable at about 0.6 for all years. This suggests that Mendeley readership counts may be useful impact indicators for both newer and older articles. The lack of dates for individual Mendeley article readers and an unknown bias toward more recent articles mean that readership data should be normalized individually by year, however, before making any comparisons between articles published in different years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little detailed information is known about who reads research articles and the contexts in which research articles are read. Using data about people who register in Mendeley as readers of articles, this article explores different types of users of Clinical Medicine, Engineering and Technology, Social Science, Physics, and Chemistry articles inside and outside academia. The majority of readers for all disciplines were PhD students, postgraduates, and postdocs but other types of academics were also represented. In addition, many Clinical Medicine articles were read by medical professionals. The highest correlations between citations and Mendeley readership counts were found for types of users who often authored academic articles, except for associate professors in some sub-disciplines. This suggests that Mendeley readership can reflect usage similar to traditional citation impact if the data are restricted to readers who are also authors without the delay of impact measured by citation counts. At the same time, Mendeley statistics can also reveal the hidden impact of some research articles, such as educational value for nonauthor users inside academia or the impact of research articles on practice for readers outside academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A set of 1.4 million biomedical papers was analyzed with regards to how often articles are mentioned on Twitter or saved by users on Mendeley. While Twitter is a microblogging platform used by a general audience to distribute information, Mendeley is a reference manager targeted at an academic user group to organize scholarly literature. Both platforms are used as sources for so-called 'altmetrics' to measure a new kind of research impact. This analysis shows in how far they differ and compare to traditional citation impact metrics based on a large set of PubMed papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General sentiment analysis for the social web has become increasingly useful for shedding light on the role of emotion in online communication and offline events in both academic research and data journalism. Nevertheless, existing general-purpose social web sentiment analysis algorithms may not be optimal for texts focussed around specific topics. This article introduces 2 new methods, mood setting and lexicon extension, to improve the accuracy of topic-specific lexical sentiment strength detection for the social web. Mood setting allows the topic mood to determine the default polarity for ostensibly neutral expressive text. Topic-specific lexicon extension involves adding topic-specific words to the default general sentiment lexicon. Experiments with 8 data sets show that both methods can improve sentiment analysis performance in corpora and are recommended when the topic focus is tightest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online videos provide a novel, and often interactive, platform for the popularization of science. One successful collection is hosted on the TED ( Technology, Entertainment, Design) website. This study uses a range of bibliometric (citation) and webometric (usage and bookmarking) indicators to examine TED videos in order to provide insights into the type and scope of their impact. The results suggest that TED Talks impact primarily the public sphere, with about three-quarters of a billion total views, rather than the academic realm. Differences were found among broad disciplinary areas, with art and design videos having generally lower levels of impact but science and technology videos generating otherwise average impact for TED. Many of the metrics were only loosely related, but there was a general consensus about the most popular videos as measured through views or comments on You Tube and the TED site. Moreover, most videos were found in at least one online syllabus and videos in online syllabi tended to be more viewed, discussed, and blogged. Less-liked videos generated more discussion, although this may be because they are more controversial. Science and technology videos presented by academics were more liked than those by nonacademics, showing that academics are not disadvantaged in this new media environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New mass publishing genres, such as blogs and personal home pages provide a rich source of social data that is yet to be fully exploited by the social sciences and humanities. Information-centered research (ICR) not only provides a genuinely new and useful information science research model for this type of data, but can also contribute to the emerging e-research infrastructure. Nevertheless, ICR should not be conducted on a purely abstract level, but should relate to potentially relevant problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities use social media to attract prospective staff, students, and funding; to engage with current students; and to support teaching and learning. Images on social media are becoming particularly dominant, and whilst Twitter is not primarily an image-based social media service, nonetheless 36 percent of links shared on Twitter point to an image. This research paper compares the types of images that universities post on Twitter to the results of previous research that has investigated the types of images that universities post on Instagram, in order to better understand how universities are using the two services for image sharing. The most popular type of image tweeted by universities was showcasing (61 percent), followed by humanizing images (20.9 percent). The dominance of showcasing images on Twitter fits with the notion of Twitter as an information source rather than a networking source, with it predominantly being used as a means of one-way communication with current students to broadcast university-specific information, rather than for attracting prospective staff, students, and funding, or to support teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]