Page 164 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

YU Houqiang，Bradley M. Hemminger，XIAO Tingting & QIU Junping / Features of Sina Weibo altmetrics indicator 163

2 Results

2.1 Coverage of Weibo altmetrics indicator

10,733 JSON files contain Weibo data, which means 10,733 scholarly artefacts are mentioned
or discussed by Weibo. In the dataset, the artefact is mainly article. 10,608 scholarly artefacts
have journal title, 7,337 scholarly artefacts have date data (including publication date and first
capture date). Because the whole dataset has 4,415,638 scholarly artefacts, the coverage of Weibo
altmetrics indicator is less than 1% in a comparatively low level, similar to Google+.
However, due to the following two reasons, the coverage of Weibo altmetrics indicator is
severely underestimated. Firstly, the limitation of tracking scope. Altmetric.com does not track
scholarly articles in Chinese journals. It’s reasonable conjecture that Weibo, as the largest
microblog service platform in Chinese environment, will discuss mainly Chinese scholarly
artefacts. Secondly, the limitation of tracking time. Altmetric.com officially began to collect
Weibo data upon publishers’ strong request from April 2014. So Weibo data is not surely complete.
Nevertheless, the dataset is so far the most comprehensive Weibo data of art.

2.2 Frequency distribution of Weibo

The statistical result of Weibos for each article is shown in Figure 3. Figure 3 is a merged bar chart
and line chart. Horizontal axis x of the bar chart is the range of number of Weibos that scholarly
articles receive; Vertical axis Y of the bar chart is percentage of articles that receive corresponding
number of Weibos; Vertical axisY of the line chart is percentage of Weibos that certain percentage
of articles have received. Key points have been highlighted, for example (1%, 30%) meant 1% of
the articles have received 30% of Weibos.

὆ Ὂ ὇
1FSDFOUBHF PG BSUJDMFT UIBU SFDFJWF DPSSFTQPOEJOH VONCFS PG XFJCPT ὆ Ὂ ὇ 1FSDFOUBHF PG XFJCPT UIBU DFJUBJO 1FSDFOUBHF PG BSUJDMFT IBWF SFDFJWFE

὆ Ὂ ὇

὆ Ὂ ὇

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ό Ὂ ὇ ό Ὂ ὇ ό Ὂ ὇ ό Ὂ ὇ ό Ὂ ὇ ό Ὂ ὇ό Ὂ ὇ό Ὂ ὇ό Ὂ ὇
/VNCFS PG XFJCPT UIBU BSUJDMFT SFDFJWF
Figure 3. Frequency distribution of Sina Weibo altmetrics.