ResearchGate: Investigating Altmetric Bibliometric Relationships for Environmental Science Researchers at Unisa

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to establish the
relationships between the altmetrics derived from ResearchGate and
bibliometrics derived from Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar in order to
establish whether the altmetrics indicators influence bibliometric indicators.
The investigation forms part of a
longitudinal e-visibility study investigating the e-visibility of the
Environmental Science researchers at the University of South Africa
during December 2014 and December 2016. Using SPSS software, the bibliometric
indicator data sourced from Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar, and
altmetric indicator data sourced from ResearchGate, were analysed to determine
the Spearman’s rank correlations between for the Environmental Science researchers.
The results indicated a strong positive correlation between the bibliometric
indicators and the altmetric indicators. This study finds that ResearchGate
altmetric indicators influence the bibliometric indicators positively and the
findings recommend ResearchGate to be utilised as an academic social networking
tool to influence the Environmental Science researcher’s citations positively
at Unisa.