Which people use which scientific papers? An evaluation of data from F1000 and Mendeley

The increased interest in an impact measurement of research on other areas of the society than research has led in scientometrics to an investigation of altmetrics. Particular attention is paid here to a targeted broad impact measurement: The aim is to discover the impact which a particular publication set has on specific user groups (outside research) by using altmetrics. This study used the Mendeley application programming interface (API) to download the Mendeley counts (broken down by different user types of publications in Mendeley) for a comprehensive F1000Prime data set. F1000Prime is a post-publication peer review system for papers from the biomedical area. As the F1000 papers are provided with tags from experts in this area (Faculty members) which can characterise a paper more exactly (such as “good for teaching” or “new finding”), the interest of different user groups in specifically tagged papers could be investigated. This study's evaluation of the variously tagged F1000 papers provided interesting insights into the use of research papers by different user groups. The most interesting tag for altmetrics research is “good for teaching”. This applies to papers which are well written and provide an overview of a topic. Papers with this tag can be expected to arouse interest among people who are hardly or not at all involved in research. The results of the regression models in this study do in fact show that lecturers, researchers at a non-academic institution, and others (such as librarians) have a special interest in this kind of papers. In the case of a key article in a field, or a particularly well written article that provides a good overview of a topic, then it will tend to be better received by people which are not particularly related to academic research.