Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 M.Sc. of Information Science, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
2 PhD Student in Information Science and Knowledge, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
3 Associate Professor, Department of Information Science, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
4 M.A. of General Psychology, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran
Abstract
1.Introduction
One of the criteria for evaluating universities and countries is the level of their research outputs in reputable international databases. The status of each country's indexed research outputs in reputable international indexes represents an important part of that country's scientific activities at the international level. Therefore, in order to evaluate scientific activities, a clear picture of this status has always been of interest to the country's research managers (Arshdi, Erfanmanesh, and Salemi, 2017). Therefore, it is essential that Iranian universities, which are considered the most important scientific hubs in the country, also pay attention to scientific outputs. Given the importance of the field of psychology in the lives of individuals, examining the status of research outputs of researchers at Iran's first-tier universities in the subject area of psychology should be considered. Therefore, this study evaluated research outputs in the subject area of psychology in Iranian first-tier universities based on Scientometric and Altmetric indicators in the Scopus and Altmetric Explorer databases during the years 2010-2021. The aim of current study is to analyze the research outputs of Iranian first-tier universities in the subject area of psychology based on Scopus database data during the years 2010-2021 with a scientometric approach (citation impact and research collaborations), an Altmetric approach (citation and markup rate), and to study the relationship between scientometric and Altmetric indicators.
Literature Review
In the study by Erfanmanesh et al. (2013), a study on the participation of Iranian psychology and psychiatry researchers showed that 83.3 percent of the reviewed products were authored through scientific collaboration of researchers, and scientific products resulting from international collaboration had a greater impact than scientific products resulting from domestic collaboration. Prime Pivar and Heminger (2012) in their study examined the correlation between citation indices by citing 24,334 articles from 7 journals with impact factors ranging from 4.4 to 9.12. They found that there was a weak correlation between specialized markup services such as "Mendeley" and "CiteYouLike" and the number of citations received. Erdet et al. (2016) in their article examined the impact of research on social media. In this study, a total of 172 articles were analyzed. This analysis showed that there has been a continuous increase in research on citation indices since 2011. The results showed that Mendeley had the highest coverage (59%) in 15 studies. An analysis of more than 40 studies showed that there was generally a statistical correlation between the Altmetric score and the number of citations. Thelwall (2017) referred to the study of primary (read in Mendeley) and secondary (citation) impact indicators. In this study, he selected ten subject areas and examined the readability of articles in the first month of publication in Mendeley and the number of citations of the same articles after 20 months. He found that there was a strong positive correlation between secondary impact and primary impact, indicating that the readability index in Mendeley was influential on citations. In another study, Moral Munoz-Cobo (2018) examined 24,701 rehabilitation articles published in Web of Science between 2013 and 2017 in a meta-analysis. They found that Twitter and LinkedIn had the highest and lowest impact on the meta-metric score of the field of empowerment, respectively. LinkedIn was also more associated with social media and had the lowest correlation with Wikipedia, but Google+, Facebook, and Wikipedia were associated with blogs. In this study, they identified the top 10 articles in terms of citation rate in Web of Science and meta-metric score and found that the top articles had two different rankings. Accordingly, they concluded that there is no correlation between meta-metrics and citations. In his article, Wissack (2019) examined the effect of meta-metrics on citations and reading in communication research. This study examined how these metrics affect readers and citations in relation to articles in communication research. This paper examined citation data along with Altmetric data from academic sites, and social networks such as ResearchGate and Mendeley. The results showed that Altmetric scores are positively related to citations. Posting articles on sites such as Mendeley and ResearchGate not only influenced readers, but also increased the likelihood of citations. Other variables that improved reader reading and citations were collaboration and active participation among researchers. Thelwall and Muflahi (2020) studied the relationship between collaboration and citations across countries and fields. The results showed that as scientific collaboration between countries and different scientific fields increases, citations also increase.
Methodology
The present study is of an applied type and Scientometric and Altmetric indicators were used in this study. The research outputs of the subject area of psychology of ten first-level universities in Iran (as selected by the Ministry of Science in 2010) available in the Scopus database (the Scopus database is a large, authoritative multidisciplinary database that covers the largest number of journals compared to other databases and is a comprehensive database for scientometric studies) and limited to 2010 to 2021 were selected as the research population. Data collection was carried out on 2/3/2022. Initially, to obtain the research outputs of the universities, the name of the university was entered on the Scopus home page in the Affiliation section, then the subject area of psychology was selected on the results page, and then the desired years were selected, and a total of 2210 research outputs were obtained from the study of ten universities in the field of psychology. The Altmetrics Explorer database was used to examine the citation and markup of research outputs of Iran's first-tier universities in the subject area of psychology. To retrieve data related to the Altmetrics performance of research outputs in the subject area of psychology in the universities in question, the digital object identifier of these outputs, after being stored in Scopus, was entered as input into the Altmetrics Explorer database and then various analyses were performed on it. In addition, the share of the relevant universities in the subject area of psychology from outputs with Altmetrics scores, information on outputs with at least one citation from the Altmetrics Explorer database was stored. In the Scival database, data related to international, national, institutional, and individual collaboration indicators as well as the total number of citations for each discipline, the average citation for each publication and the weighted citation impact at the discipline level, the percentage of articles published in top journals, the percentage of highly cited articles and the H-index were extracted. Due to the non-normal distribution of the data obtained from the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Spearman's correlation test was used to respond to the correlation between the citation index and the Altmetrics score. Finally, in the data analysis stage, Excel software was used for descriptive statistics and SPSS software version 22 was used for inferential statistics, and a scatter diagram was drawn. In the continuation of the study, the relationship between the citation index and the Altmetrics score was tested, and the test results showed that there was a statistically significant, positive and weak relationship between the citation indices and the Altmetrics score in the three universities of Allameh Tabataba'i (P=0.048 and r=0.249), Shahid Beheshti (P=0.006 and r=0.273) and Isfahan (P=0.012 and r=0.341). In other words, if the Altmetrics score of a research output is higher and it is mentioned more in various social media, the citation rate of that output is also higher. In Figure 1, the correlation graph between the citation index and the Altmetrics score can be seen. The vertical axis shows the citation rate and the horizontal axis shows the Altmetrics score. It should be noted that in the rest of the universities, there was no statistically significant relationship between the citation indices and the Altmetrics score, and due to space limitations in the article, the scatter plot is not included here.
Results
The findings revealed that the University of Tehran ranks first with the highest research output, the highest citations, and the H-index, and among them, Tarbiat Modares University has the best performance in terms of the impact of its research outputs with the highest average citation value, citation impact at the field level, percentage of highly cited articles, and percentage of articles published in top journals. The highest international research output is related to Shiraz University, followed by Tarbiat Modares and Shahid Beheshti Universities with a slight difference, while Allameh Tabataba'i University has the highest national research output, and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad has the highest institutional cooperation in publishing research outputs among the universities studied. It was further revealed that Isfahan University has the highest individual research outputs. By studying the status of Altmetric indicators of research outputs of ten universities in the subject area of psychology, the findings showed that Shiraz University with the highest Altmetric coverage is in the first place, followed by Bahonar University of Kerman and Shahid Beheshti University in the next ranks, respectively. Also, in terms of average citations and markups, Allameh Tabataba'i, Tarbiat Modares, and Isfahan Universities are in first and third places. Furthermore, according to the findings, it was determined that the Shahid Chamran Universities of Ahvaz, Tarbiat Modares, and Tabriz had the highest average Altmetric scores and performed better.
In the continuation of the study, the relationship between the citation index and the Altmetric score was tested, and the test results showed that there was a statistically significant, positive and weak relationship between the citation indices and the Altmetric score in the three universities of Allameh Tabataba'i (P=0.048 and r=0.249), Shahid Beheshti (P=0.006 and r=0.273) and Isfahan (P=0.012 and r=0.341). In other words, if the Altmetric score of research output is higher and it is mentioned more in various social media, the citation rate of that output is also higher. In Figure 1, the correlation diagram between the citation index and the Altmetric score can be seen. The vertical axis shows the citation rate and the horizontal axis shows the Altmetric score. It should be noted that in the other universities, there was no statistically significant relationship between the citation indices and the Altmetric score.
Discussion
The current study aimed to study the citation impact and social impact of research outputs of ten Iranian first-tier universities in the subject area of psychology. According to the results, it was found that the University of Tehran ranks first among the ten universities studied with high research outputs and citations. However, considering that Tarbiat Modares University is in the middle ranks in terms of production and citations, it performs better than other universities in terms of quality indicators (percentage of articles published in top journals (first quartile), percentage of highly cited articles (10 percent), and weighted citation impact at the field level), and this indicates the high quality of research outputs at this university. In this regard, it is very important for the university to emphasize the quality of research outputs in addition to the quantity of these outputs. Also, considering special research points and credit for authors of articles in top journals can be a suitable solution to increase the quality of research outputs. In the collaborations section, the findings showed that research outputs with high international collaborations have favorable citations, which indicates that collaboration with different countries can be effective in increasing citations, which is consistent with the results of the research of Erfan-Manesh et al. (2013), Erfan-Manesh and Hosseini (2017), Mohammadzadeh, Fahmyifar and Hassanzadeh (2014), Mostafavi and Azh (2014), Visak (2019), and Talwal and Muflahi (2020). In these studies, different dimensions of researchers' scientific participation and the citation impact of scientific productions were examined, and the results showed that the documents resulting from collaboration can be effective in receiving their citations.
Conclusion
The findings of the present study indicated the positive effect of social media in increasing the citation of research outputs. However, in this regard, according to the results, it was determined that the research outputs under study in the field of psychology did not have appropriate Altmetrics coverage (presence on social media). In order to increase the visibility of research outputs at the national and international levels and subsequently increase the impact indicators of outputs, it is necessary to take measures in this area, including: emphasizing Altmetrics indicators as a complement to the indicators for evaluating outputs, emphasizing the quality along with the quantity of research conducted in universities, holding workshops for researchers on the benefits and methods of using social media, and active membership of researchers and creating user accounts for journals on social media and timely sharing of the full text or at least the detailed abstract of the outputs in these media.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Dr. Mohammad Amin Erfanmanesh, a researcher at the Eastern Canada Higher Education Commission, for his cooperation in the research.
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