Evaluation of the national research foundation-rated researchers' output at a South African university

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to establish the research impact of the National Research Foundation (NRF)-rated researchers' output at the North-West University (NWU), South Africa, from 2006 to 2017. Design/methodology/approach The study used bibliometrics and altmetrics methods to determine the production of research outputs and the impact of NWU's NRF-rated researchers' publications. Various tools including Google Scholar (GS), Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, ResearchGate (RG) and Mendeley were used to collect data. The citations in the three bibliographic databases were used as proxy for academic impact, while reads and readerships in RG and Mendeley were used to determine societal impact of the researchers. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to test the relationship between citations in the three bibliographic databases and reads and readerships in RG and Mendeley. Findings The main findings were that the majority of NWU's NRF-rated researchers' publications emanated from GS, followed by Scopus and then WoS. GS output also had more citations. There were 6,026 research outputs in RG which were read for 676,919 times and 5,850 in Mendeley with 142,621 readerships. Correlations between RG and all three bibliographic databases' citations were scant. Strong relationships between the three bibliographic databases' citations and Mendeley readerships were found. Practical implications - Academic librarians who interact with researchers who would like to predict future academic impact of their documents can be advised to consider Mendeley readerships with some level of confidence compared to RG reads. These results point to the importance of constant self-evaluation by researchers to ensure that they have balanced profiles across the three main bibliographic databases that are also considered for ratings. These results point to the relevancy of GS to evaluate research beyond the academy. Social implications - The fact that researchers are contributing research that seeks to improve the general welfare of the population (beyond the academy) is a positive sign as society look up to researchers and research to solve their socio-economic problems. Social media play an important role as they serve as indicators that indicators point to wider research impacts and wider access by many different groups of people including the members of society at large. They point to research that is accessible to not only researchers and those who have access to their research but also the society at large. Originality/value Although the practice of rating researchers is common in different research ecosystems, the researchers could not find any evidence of studies conducted using a combination of bibliometrics and altmetrics to asses rated researchers' output. This study covers and compares social impact based on data obtained from two academic social media sites and three main bibliographic databases (GS, Scopus and WoS).