Who Reads Indian and Chinese LIS Articles on Mendeley? Scoping and Comparing User Categories Through Altmetrics

Abstract

Mendeley reader count is good evidence of the early impact of scientific output since it appears before citations. This paper aims to scope and compare Mendeley readers of Library and Information Science (LIS) articles published from India and China. Mendeley readership data for the highly cited 1,000 articles in Web of Science are extracted using Webometric Analyst for both countries and are analysed using Excel and SPSS. The findings reveal that LIS articles that are published from China got more readers as compared to LIS articles published from India with an excess of 97 readers per paper on Mendeley. The occupational status of readers tells that PhD students are the top readers for both the countries' publications, followed by masters students. Discipline-wise readership shows that readers were spread across 29 different fields, with the highest readers from business, management and accounting, followed by computer science for both countries' publications. Location-wise readership depicts that the top engaged readers are from the United States for both the countries' publications. Finally, the study reports a positive association between citations and Mendeley bookmarks, justifying that Mendeley readership can be used to measure the early research impact of LIS scholarship in both countries.