On the relationships between bibliographic characteristics of scientific documents and citation and Mendeley readership counts: A large-scale analysis of Web of Science publications

• Published in: Journal of informetrics 2018-02, Vol.12 (1), p.191-202
• Main Authors: Zahedi, Zohreh, Haustein, Stefanie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bibliographic characteristics; Document types; Mendeley readership; WoS citation
• ISSN: 1751-1577; 1875-5879
• DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2017.12.005

•This study presents relationship between Mendeley readership and citation counts with particular documents’ bibliographic characteristics.•Ordinary Least Squares regression used to assess the relationships between dependent and independent variables.•Compared to citations, readership exhibits relatively higher density values for editorial materials, letters, and news items.•Factors influencing readership and citation counts are broadly similar across all fields. In this paper we present a first large-scale analysis of the relationship between Mendeley readership and citation counts with particular documents’ bibliographic characteristics. A data set of 1.3 million publications from different fields published in journals covered by the Web of Science (WoS) has been analyzed. This work reveals that document types that are often excluded from citation analysis due to their lower citation values, like editorial materials, letters, news items, or meeting abstracts, are strongly covered and saved in Mendeley, suggesting that Mendeley readership can reliably inform the analysis of these document types. Findings show that collaborative papers are frequently saved in Mendeley, which is similar to what is observed for citations. The relationship between readership and the length of titles and number of pages, however, is weaker than for the same relationship observed for citations. The analysis of different disciplines also points to different patterns in the relationship between several document characteristics, readership, and citation counts. Overall, results highlight that although disciplinary differences exist, readership counts are related to similar bibliographic characteristics as those related to citation counts, reinforcing the idea that Mendeley readership and citations capture a similar concept of impact, although they cannot be considered as equivalent indicators.