Work Description

Title: Dataset and codebook for "Altmetrics and social reference managers: An examination of demographics and ideologies of scholarly communication"

Open Access Deposited
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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Abstract
  • Altmetric indicators are increasingly present in the research landscape. Among this ecosystem of heterogeneous indicators, social reference managers have been proposed as indicators of broader use of scholarly work. This work uses a large-scale survey to study the users of two prominent social reference managers—Mendeley and Zotero. The survey examines demographic characteristics, usage of the platforms, as well as attitudes towards key issues in scholarly communication, such as open access, peer review, privacy, and the reward system of science. Results show strong differences across platforms: Mendeley users are younger and more gender-balanced; Zotero users are more engaged in social media and more likely to come from the social sciences and humanities. Zotero users were more likely to use the platform’s search functions and to organize their libraries, while Mendeley users were more likely to take advantage of some of the community functions—such as browsing papers and groups and connecting with other users. We discuss the implications of using metrics derived from these platforms as impact indicators.
Methodology
  • Two online surveys were designed specifically for Mendeley and Zotero users, each composed of 22 question stems in three parts, including demographic information, user behavior, and meaning and motivation, with a study and consent information sheet appended in the beginning. Socio-demographic information collected included gender, age, current place of residence, level of education, occupation/status, and affiliated disciplines. Questions regarding user behavior ranged from the length of use, pattern of use over time, platform primarily used, group membership, to frequency of performing different kinds of tasks including discoverability, adding and organizing, re-using, and networking. Meaning and motivation questions included rating the importance of social reference managers in fulfilling different tasks/activities to level of engagement in reading, citation, curation, and sociability, as well as their ideological positions toward scholarly communication. Answers to the questions regarding level of importance were marked on a Likert scale from 1 (not at all important) to 5 (extremely important). Likewise, answers regarding level of agreement are marked from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). For the purpose of comparison, the wording and the order of the questions for the two surveys were held constant except when the names of the respective social reference managers and terminology exclusively used by each were mentioned, e.g., platforms (Mendeley: online/desktop vs Zotero: standalone/for Firefox) as well as the unit of readership counts (Mendeley readership vs Zotero library). Moreover, as Zotero was released earlier than Mendeley, Zotero survey has an extra option of “more than seven years” in the question about the length of use. The surveys were hosted on Qualtrics and distributed from mid-April to early June 2016.
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Contact information
Funding agency
  • Other Funding Agency
Other Funding agency
  • This work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant #G-2014-3-25. The funders had no role in study design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Keyword
Date coverage
  • 2016-04 to 2016-06
Citations to related material
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Last modified
  • 09/15/2020
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To Cite this Work:
Chen, P., Hayes, E., Larivière, V., Sugimoto, C. Dataset and codebook for "Altmetrics and social reference managers: An examination of demographics and ideologies of scholarly communication" [Data set]. Indiana University - DataCORE.

Files (Count: 2; Size: 361 KB)

Thumbnail Title Original Upload Last Modified File Size Access Actions
altmetricsandsocialreferencemanagers_data.csv altmetricsandsocialreferencemana...a.csv 2020-09-15 2020-09-15 30.5 KB Open Access
altmetricsandsocialreferencemanagers_data.xlsx altmetricsandsocialreferencemana....xlsx 2020-09-15 2020-09-15 330 KB Open Access

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