Mendeley Readers of Highly-Cited Articles in Medical Sciences: Is It Correlated With Citations?

Abstract The number of Mendeley readers and the number of citations are indicators of a research evaluation. In many cases, they have a significant correlation with each other. However, there is a minimal amount of evidence regarding the correlation between these two variables in highly-cited articles. The present study aimed to investigate the correlation between the number of Mendeley readers and the number of citations in highly-cited medical articles. The research population includes all highly-cited articles in various fields of medicine indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) in 2016. The number of citations was extracted from the WoS, and the number of Mendeley readers was extracted using the webometric analyst. Findings revealed that the most Mendeley readers are related to the field of general and internal medicine with an average of 570.43, and the lowest is dedicated to otorhinolaryngology with an average of 86.2. Also, the highest average citation belongs to general and internal medicine (338.18) and the lowest to nursing (40.84). Pearson correlation coefficient showed that the relationship between the number of Mendeley readers and the number of citations received by all medical articles is positive and significant (p-value <0.001, r = 0.644). In various fields of medicine, except orthopedics, there is a positive and significant relationship between two variables. Evidence suggests that Mendeley data can determine the effectiveness of articles. It seems that more researchers’ use of Mendeley will increase the visibility and readers of the articles and, as a result, will lead to more citations.