W H E R E A N D H O W K N O W L E D G E O N D I G I TA L L I B R A R Y E VA L U AT I O N S P R E A D S : A C A S E S T U D Y O N C O N F E R E N C E L I T E R AT U R E

LEONIDAS PAPACHRISTOPOULOS, ANGELOS MITRELIS, CHRISTOS PAPATHEODOROU DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES, LIBRARY SCIENCE & MUSEOLOGY, IONIAN UNIVERSITY, GREECE !GIANNIS TSAKONAS LIBRARY & INFORMATION CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF PATRAS, GREECE

A I M & S C O P E O F R E S E A R C H

• Can ‘altmetrics’ - in the form of Mendeley Readership statistics - reveal knowledge diffusion patterns?

• Can data from ‘altmetrics’ - in combination with traditional metrics - help us create quality profiles of conference papers?

A LT M E T R I C S

• A new portfolio of metrics, based on automatically processed web interactions and transactions.

• Downloads, Views, Shares, Likes, Tweets, etc.

• Alternative: contradiction with the existing system of calculation and assessment.

• Complementary: relation of ‘altmetrics’ with citations.

C O N F E R E N C E L I T E R AT U R E

• An overlooked publication venue

• Hard to index / calculate

• differences in periodicity

• unavailability of a commonly agreed quality system

• superabundance of events

M E N D E L E Y : W H Y

• A reference management system.

• A social network for scholars.

• Mendeley’s coverage, especially in cases of very specific venues, such as the conferences, has proven to be very broad.

• www.mendeley.com

R E S E A R C H S E T T I N G

• Corpus

• number of papers: 224

• domain: digital library evaluation

• sources: two conferences, JCDL and ECDL

• period: 2001-2011

• Data

• Mendeley Readership statistics

• Google Scholar citations

R E A D E R S H I P N E T W O R K

• nodes = countries

• reader’s country (vai)

• paper’s country (vbi)

• edges (vai, vbi) = state of readership

• the inclusion of a paper b in the collection of a Mendeley reader a.

W H E R E I T F L O W S : J C D L

W H E R E I T F L O W S : E C D L

R E A D E R S

0

20

40

60

80

100

Practitioner

PhD Student

Researcher

MSc Student

Faculty

27

64

25

7466

26

4853

84

97

0

28

56

84

112

140

Com

puter Science

Social Sciences

Hum

anities

Engineering

Education

Design

Psychology

10816

00

29

98

00101112

27

124

statusdiscipline E C D L J C D L

R E A D E R S v s C I TAT I O N S

0

20

40

60

80

100

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160

JCDL ECDL

Google Scholar Citations

Men

del

ey R

ead

ers

Disambiguating Geographic Names in

a Historical Digital Library [2001]

Enhancing digital libraries with

TechLens [2004]

A LT M E T R I C S A S ‘ C O N F M E T R I C S ’ ?

• An altmetrics powered impact indicator

• readers

• citations

• acceptance rate

• year

• The harmonic mean of two quality rates, the readers’ and the citations’.

Conf. Cites Reads Year Acpt. Rate

Indic.

a ECDL 61 30 2003 29% 0.34

b JCDL 61 47 2007 36% 0.18

C L O S I N G R E M A R K S

• Readership: a balanced kind of metric in the landscape of ‘altmetrics’

• More elaborate statistics are needed - at least in the case of Mendeley.

• We were able to see which countries produce and which consume knowledge on digital library evaluation.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION !full paper at: http://hdl.handle.net/10889/7587

addendum at: http://gtsak.info/blog/gallery/lida-addendum/

!contact: john@lis.upatras.gr / twitter: @gtsakonas