Page 161 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

Features of Sina Weibo altmetrics indicator ①a

1
2
1①b *
YU Houqiang ，Bradley M. Hemminger ，XIAO Tingting & QIU Junping 1
1 School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
2 School of Information and Library Science, UNC Chapel Hill 27514，USA

Abstract
With statistical analysis of Weibo altmetrics indicator, the paper explored features of a typical altmetrics
indicator in Chinese environment. Results show that the coverage of Weibo is below 1%. However, the
coverage is underestimated due to limitation of tracking time and objects. Weibo mentions and discusses
articles mainly from disciplines like “General”, “Biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology”, “Health
science”, “Medicine” and “Life science” etc. In addition to traditional distinguished interdisciplinary
journals like Nature, preprint platform and open access journal like arXiv, PLoS ONE and SSRN also
drew much attention from Weibo. Meanwhile, “Biology Science” and “Medical science” have the most
highlighted journals. Weibo mainly tracks latest articles, reflected in that articles tracked within 180
days occupy 68.66%, it also tracks classic articles. Weibo authors prefer to disseminate, recommend
and criticize articles that are adherent to daily life, funny, useful or related to health, which conveys
social value and scholarly value beyond citations. Weibo altmetrics indicator is highly scattered and
concentrated. 5.1% of the articles have harvested 50% of the weibos. Besides, articles tracked by Weibo
gain global attention much higher than the average level.
Keywords
Altmetrics, Weibo, Altmetrics indicators, Scholarly communication, Altmetrics score

0 Introduction

A pivotal symbol of digital era is the increasingly recorded digital traces. Trace unveils
behavior. And behavior conveys value. This is the data to value chain. Altmetrics, by capturing
scholars’ scholarly traces, aims to reveal scholars’ research behavior, so as to improve scholarly
communication, scientific evaluation and literature discovery (Moed, 2015). Citation is merely one
particular scholarly behavior. From literature retrieval to reading annotation, from idea formation
to specific conduction and eventual article writing, scholars have gone through series of scholarly
behaviors. In the traditional paper environment, citation behavior was recorded in citations, which
gave birth to citation analysis. In the digital era, traces of scholars’ behaviors are recorded in
scholarly tools and platforms. These tools and platforms have generated huge quanta of data that
later become the foundation of altmetrics. From this perspective, altmetrics is an embodiment of

①a This article is an outcome of the project “Theoretical and Empirical Studies of Altmetrics” (No.2014104010201) supported by
Key Project of Special Funding from China University Fundamental Research Funding.
* Correspondence should be addressed to YU Houqiang，Email: yuhouq@yeah.net，ORCID: 0000-0002-9241-6630