Page 166 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

YU Houqiang，Bradley M. Hemminger，XIAO Tingting & QIU Junping / Features of Sina Weibo altmetrics indicator 165

Table 1 shows that, #1 article with the highest Weibo indicator, entitled with The Color Red, and
the Anger of Cattle, was published in Psychological Review. It was highly discussed by Weibo
and the frequency reached 489 times. The article studied animal’s behavior and the conclusions
amended several common misled understanding of animal’s behavior. As a matter of fact, #1 was
mostly discussed together with another physiology article entitled with Sweating on paws and
palms: what is its function? Weibo authors demonstrated conclusions of these two articles using
illustrations, and disseminated interesting facts that shock the public’s inherent false knowledge.
#2 article was an economic article. It used rock-paper-scissor as example to study collaborative
game theory. Weiboers felt that the article expounded the underlying mechanism of rock-paper-
scissor, a most common game in daily life, and thus commented and shared it. #3 article is a
medical article, and discovered a type of virus that killed cancer cells only. #4 article is an article
of computer science, and the author developed a vector representation tool for large scale network.
#5 article was also a medical article, and studied the right way of using children medicine
Acetaminophen.
By observing topics of above articles and content of Weibos, we found the top Weiboed articles
share one of the following features: 1) close to daily life ( like #1, #2, #5); 2) is of entertainment
(like #1, #2); 3) shock inherent cognition (like #1, #5); 4) provides useful scholarly tool (like
#4); 5) relates to life and health (like #3, #5). Weibos of these scholarly articles have one of the
following features: 1) disseminate research results, of entertainment (like #1, #2); 2) disseminate
research results, recommend for reference or usage (like #4, #5); 3) comment research results,
propose criticism and recognition (like #3).

2.3 Immediacy distribution of Weibo altmetrics indicator

Citations take months or years to accumulate which is a shortage of citation indicators. We
investigated the timeliness of Weibo altmetrics indicator. Based on the time difference T d between
the publication date T p and first Weibo date T m , if T d =T m -T p <180(days), the altmetrics indicator
is defined to be timely. We gave the distribution of T d in period of 1 day, 7 days, 30 days, 180
days and 360 days. The distribution is shown in Figure 4. Horizontal axis is T d , vertical axis is the
number and percentage of articles with timeliness .
From Figure 4, we see the percentage of articles that got discussed within one day (including less
than one day) reached 22.64%. The percentage of articles that got discussed within 7 days reached
43.94%. Within 180 days, the percentage of articles that got discussed was 68.66%. This indicated
that Weibo altmetrics indicator is timely, because around 70% Weibos of scholarly articles
happened within 180 days of the formal publishing. Interestingly, 6.9% scholarly articles were
mentioned and discussed even before formal publishing. Preprints and publishing online articles
were majority of this type of articles. Meanwhile, there were 26.5% of the articles were Weiboed