Research evaluation of computer science publications using Altmetrics: a cohort study of Indian Central Universities

Purpose Social interaction applications and reference tools are actively used by researchers to share and manage their research publications. Thus, this paper aims to determine the scholarly impact of selected Indian central universities. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzed 669 articles having both Dimensions citations and Altmetric attention scores published by 35 Indian central universities for 4 subfields of Computer Science using Altmetric Explorer. This paper determined each university’s contribution in the studied subfields of Computer Science and the correlation among Altmetric attention score (aggregated and individual), Dimensions citation, and Mendeley readership counts for all 669 articles and stratified percentile sets of top 25%, and top 50% of the overall number of articles. Findings The findings showed that Jawaharlal Nehru University had the maximum Altmetric attention score, Banaras Hindu University received the maximum Dimensions citation, and University of Hyderabad (UoH) received the maximum number of Mendeley readers. Each central university was examined individually and then ranked based on their median values of Dimensions citations and Altmetric attention scores. Further, Twitter had the maximum Altmetric coverage, followed by Google+, Patent and Facebook for the retrieved articles. A significant strong positive correlation was observed between the Dimensions citation and Mendeley readership counts for all the three categories. Research limitations/implications Both Altmetric attention scores and Dimensions citations can help funding agencies to assess and evaluate the research productivity of these universities, thus, making important decisions such as increasing, decreasing, re-distributing their funds. Originality/value The current body of research is focused mostly on relationships between citations and individual Altmetric indicators predominantly. For most of the studies, the citations were retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science or Google Scholar database. It was observed that by far, no study had examined the relationship between citations retrieved from Dimensions database, Altmetrics scores (both aggregated and individual) and Mendeley readership counts.