Altmetrics Research Progress: A Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization

The present study explores the altmetrics research area through bibliometric analysis and visualization. For the investigation of research material Scopus database was chosen, to obtain the bibliographic data. The search in database resulted in 973 documents. The data was obtained in CSV file format and for the basic data processing excel was used whereas for the visualization network VOSviewer software was employed. The investigation revealed that around 30.34% documents have open access. The major document type was articles (65.05%), with journals (81.39%) as major sources for document and English (92.70%) as the dominant language for documents. The research also revealed that there has been a constant rise in the number of publications in the field since its inception and documents belong to different subject areas with social science leading the way. The major sources were Scientometrics (12.33%) and Journal of Informetrics (3.18%). Most productive authors were Mike Thelwall (41 documents), Lutz Bornmann (32 documents): most producing countries were USA (264 documents) United Kingdom (141 documents); and most producing organizations were University of Wolverhampton with 43 documents, Administrative Headquarters of the Max Planck Society with 32 documents. The visualization of author network revealed that collaborations between top authors are taking place but in a close knitted environment where one group of authors do not collaborate much with other group. The country collaboration network revealed that the top countries are extensively collaborating without any restrictions and developing countries like India, Pakistan are part of this collaboration network as well. The term map created out of the abstract and title information of research documents also revealed the trend of research in the altmetrics field.