Social Media Metrics of Indian Covid-19 Research: An Altmetric Analysis

Abstract

The current pandemic situation due to Covid-19 has put every researcher on their toes to discover new methods (whether medicine or tools and techniques) to overcome the menace from the human population. The research focus has given the generation of enormous amount of both published literature and raw research data. The research impact analysis with the help of traditional method is a time-consuming process, resulted in choosing alternative methods of impact measurement – now popularly known as Altmetric. The article analyses social media metrics of Indian publications on Covid-19 through altmetric approaches. The data for the study has been taken from Scopus and Altmetric.com and analysis was carried out for different social media activities to calculate the Altmetric attention score for Indian published literatures. An analysis was also carried out to assess whether the alternative metrics have any correlation with the citation impact. It is found that correlation between some of the social media activities and citations is highly significant.