Altmetrics of South African Journals: Implications for Scholarly Impact of South African Research

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate and compare the social media (SM) impact of 273 South Africa Post-Secondary Education accredited journals, which are recognised by the Department of Higher Education and Training of South Africa for purposes of financial support. We used multiple sources to extract data for the study, namely, Altmetric.com, Google Scholar (GS), Scopus (through SCImago) and the Thomson Reuters (TR) Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Data was analysed to determine South African journals’ presence in and impact on SM as well as to contrast SM visibility and impact with the citation impact in GS, JCR and Scopus. The Spearman correlation test was performed to compare the impact of the journals on SM and other sources. The results reveal that 2923 articles published in 122 of the 273 South African (SA) journals have received at least one mention in SM; the most commonly used SM platforms were Twitter and Facebook; the journals indexed in the TR’s citation indexes and Scopus performed much better, in terms of their average altmetrics, than non-TR and non-Scopus indexed journals; and there were weak to moderate relationships among different types of altmetrics and citation-based measures, thereby implying different kinds of journal impacts on SM when compared to the scholarly impact reflected in citation databases. In conclusion, South African journals’ impact on SM, just as is the case with countries with similar economies, is minimal but has shown signs of growth.