Scholarly communication has not remained unaffected by the advance of the social networking culture. The traditional bibliometric paradigm is strongly questioned as a tool that accurately portrays the impact of research outcomes. New metrics, such as download or view rates and shares, have been proposed as alternative ways for measuring the impact of digital content published in the form of articles, datasets, etc. Mendeley's Readership Statistics are one of these metrics, based on the assumption that there is a linkage between a paper in a collection and the interests of collection owner. The current study explores the “altmetric” aspects of the literature of the Digital Libraries Evaluation domain, as it is expressed in two major conferences of the field, namely JCDL and ECDL. Our corpus consists of 224 papers, for which we extract readership data from Mendeley and examine in how many collections these papers belong to. Our goal is to investigate whether readership statistics can help us to understand where and to whom DL evaluation research has impact. Therefore the data are analyzed statistically to produce indicators of geographical, and topical distribution of Mendeley Readers as well as to explore and classify their their profession. Finally it derived that there is a loose correlation between the number of Google Scholar citations and the number of Mendeley readers. Paper presented at LIDA2014, on Tuesday, July 17, 2014. Full text paper available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10889/7587

1. 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 RY 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

2. 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?

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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.

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

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

10. R E A D E R S
0
20
40
60
80
100
Practitioner
PhDStudent
Researcher
MScStudent
Faculty
27
64
25
74
66
26
48
53
84
97
0
28
56
84
112
140
ComputerScience
SocialSciences
Humanities
Engineering
Education
Design
Psychology
108
16
00
29
98
00101112
27
124
statusdiscipline E C D L J C D L

11. 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
MendeleyReaders
Disambiguating
Geographic Names in
a Historical Digital
Library [2001]
Enhancing digital
libraries with
TechLens [2004]

12. 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

13. 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.

14. 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