A 2D Evaluation of Altmetrics Influence in Citation Growth: Case Study of Indian Research Articles in PLoS Journals

The general approach of research impact evaluation is entirely based upon citations. But in the current Web2.0 era, this citation based evaluation process often do not include the generic discussions people make in social media, blogs, online scholarly discussion forums or even the online readership of the article. Altmetrics, often referred as the article level metrics is a tool that have emerged, which crowd source all the non-citation based discussions from various web2.0 platforms and tries to reflect the overhaul attention that an article gets. Since its introduction, altmetrics have been able to gather a good attention from the scientific community, and researchers are trying to evaluate if it does have scholarly value to complement the citation based impact measure process. The current study tries to evaluate altmetrics penetration in Indian research articles and the influence of altmetrics in the citation growth process. The problem was addressed taking the example of Indian research articles published in PLoS journals. Two hypothesis were set for the study and PLoS altmetrics data were taken to run the t-test for paired sample mean to test the hypothesis. Findings from the t-test estimated a low significant p value, hence rejecting the null hypothesis and accepting the alternate hypothesis proving the positive influence of altmetrics in the citation growth process for the Indian research articles in PLoS journals. Also the presence of altmetrics data in the Indian research articles of PLoS journals is evaluated in the study.