Construction of Scientific Impact Evaluation Model Based on Altmetrics

Altmetrics is an emergent research area whereby social media is applied as a source of metrics to evaluate scientific impact. Recently, the interest in altmetrics has been growing. Traditional scientific impact evaluation indictors are based on the number of publications, citation counts and peer reviews of a researcher. As research publications were increasingly placed online, usage metrics as well as webometrics appeared. This paper explores the potential benefits of altmetrics and the deep relationship between each metrics. Firstly, we found a weak-to-medium correlation among the 11 altmetrics and visualized such correlation. Secondly, we conducted principal component analysis and exploratory factor analysis on altmetrics of social media, divided the 11 altmetrics into four feature sets, confirming the dispersion and relative concentration of altmetrics groups and developed the altmetrics evaluation model. We can use this model to evaluate the scientific impact of articles on social media.