Altmetrics for country-level research assessment

Abstract

Changes are occurring in scholarly communication and the geography of science.Policymakersand research funding agencies are looking for ways to measure the comprehensive impact of research and benefit from the research experiences of other nations. Recently, altmetrics have been used to measure broader impact of research activities.In this paper, we study altmetrics based on the country-levelimpact andfind that altmetrics can support research evaluation for all countries studied. We compare altmetrics with several traditional metrics and findsignificant relationshipsbetween country-level altmetrics and the number of publications, citations, h-index, and gross domestic expenditure on research and development (GERD). We also find a significant yearly increase in the number of articles published between 2010 and 2014 that received altmetrics.