What does Twitter Measure?: Influence of Diverse User Groups in Altmetrics

Abstract

The most important goal for digital libraries is to ensure high quality search experience for all kinds of users. To attain this goal, it is necessary to have as much relevant metadata as possible at hand to assess the quality of publications. Recently, a new group of metrics appeared, that has the potential to raise the quality of publication metadata to the next level -- the altmetrics. These metrics try to reflect the impact of publications within the social web. However, currently it is still unclear if and how altmetrics should be used to assess the quality of a publication and how altmetrics are related to classical bibliographical metrics (like e.g. citations). To gain more insights about what kind of concepts are reflected by altmetrics, we conducted an in-depth analysis on a real world dataset crawled from the Public Library of Science (PLOS). Especially, we analyzed if the common approach to regard the users in the social web as one homogeneous group is sensible or if users need to be divided into diverse groups in order to receive meaningful results.