A Large-scale Comparison of Coverage and Mentions Captured by the Two Altmetric Aggregators

Abstract

The increased social media attention to scholarly articles has resulted in creation of platforms & services to track the social media transactions around them. Altmetric.com and PlumX are two such popular altmetric aggregators. Scholarly articles get mentions in different social platforms (such as Twitter, Blog, Facebook) and academic social networks (such as Mendeley, Academia and ResearchGate). The aggregators track activity and events in social media and academic social networks and provide the coverage and transaction data to researchers for various purposes. Some previous studies have compared different altmetric aggregators and found differences in the coverage and mentions captured by them. This paper attempts to revisit the question by doing a large-scale analysis of altmetric mentions captured by the two aggregators, for a set 1,785,149 publication records from Web of Science. Results obtained show that PlumX tracks more altmetric sources and captures altmetric events for a larger number of articles as compared to Altmetric.com. However, the coverage and average mentions of the two aggregators, for the same set of articles, vary across different platforms, with Altmetric.com recording higher mentions in Twitter and Blog, and PlumX recording higher mentions in Facebook and Mendeley. The article also analysed coverage and average mentions captured by the two aggregators across different document types, subjects and publishers.