How quickly do publications get read? The evolution of Mendeley reader counts for new articles

Maflahi, Nabeil; Thelwall, Mike

dc.contributor.author	Maflahi, Nabeil
dc.contributor.author	Thelwall, Mike
dc.date.accessioned	2017-06-22T10:56:07Z
dc.date.available	2017-06-22T10:56:07Z
dc.date.issued	2017-08-29
dc.identifier.citation	Maflahi, N., & Thelwall, M. (2017). How quickly do publications get read? The evolution of mendeley reader counts for new articles. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 69 (1), pp 158-167.
dc.identifier.issn	2330-1643	en
dc.identifier.doi	10.1002/asi.23909
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/2436/620522
dc.description	This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley-Blackwell in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 29/08/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23909 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.
dc.description.abstract	Within science, citation counts are widely used to estimate research impact but publication delays mean that they are not useful for recent research. This gap can be filled by Mendeley reader counts, which are valuable early impact indicators for academic articles because they appear before citations and correlate strongly with them. Nevertheless, it is not known how Mendeley readership counts accumulate within the year of publication, and so it is unclear how soon they can be used. In response, this paper reports a longitudinal weekly study of the Mendeley readers of articles in six library and information science journals from 2016. The results suggest that Mendeley readers accrue from when articles are first available online and continue to steadily build. For journals with large publication delays, articles can already have substantial numbers of readers by their publication date. Thus, Mendeley reader counts may even be useful as early impact indicators for articles before they have been officially published in a journal issue. If field normalised indicators are needed, then these can be generated when journal issues are published using the online first date.
dc.format	application/pdf
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.publisher	Wiley-Blackwell	en
dc.relation.url	https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/asi.23909	en
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/	*
dc.subject	Altmetrics	en
dc.subject	Mendeley	en
dc.title	How quickly do publications get read? The evolution of Mendeley reader counts for new articles	en
dc.type	Journal article
dc.identifier.journal	Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology	en
dc.date.accepted	2017-05-15
rioxxterms.funder	University of Wolverhampton	en
rioxxterms.identifier.project	UoW220617MT	en
rioxxterms.version	AM	en
rioxxterms.licenseref.uri	https://creativecommons.org/CC BY-NC-ND 4.0	en
rioxxterms.licenseref.startdate	2017-9-22	en
dc.source.volume	69
dc.source.issue	1
dc.source.beginpage	158
dc.source.endpage	167
refterms.dateFCD	2019-03-20T10:16:05Z
refterms.versionFCD	AM
refterms.dateFOA	2018-08-21T14:01:47Z
html.description.abstract	Within science, citation counts are widely used to estimate research impact but publication delays mean that they are not useful for recent research. This gap can be filled by Mendeley reader counts, which are valuable early impact indicators for academic articles because they appear before citations and correlate strongly with them. Nevertheless, it is not known how Mendeley readership counts accumulate within the year of publication, and so it is unclear how soon they can be used. In response, this paper reports a longitudinal weekly study of the Mendeley readers of articles in six library and information science journals from 2016. The results suggest that Mendeley readers accrue from when articles are first available online and continue to steadily build. For journals with large publication delays, articles can already have substantial numbers of readers by their publication date. Thus, Mendeley reader counts may even be useful as early impact indicators for articles before they have been officially published in a journal issue. If field normalised indicators are needed, then these can be generated when journal issues are published using the online first date.