Characteristics of Mendeley Readership for Earth and Planetary Science Articles: An Exploratory Study of 12 Narrow Scopus Fields

The scientific community considers readership analysis of academic artifacts to be a significant endeavor. The reference manager's readership count is a momentous indication for early research evaluation. In response, this study demonstrates the characteristics of Mendeley readership for EPS articles from twelve narrow disciplines and compares than with citations. The bibliographic and citation data have been collected from Scopus and the corresponding readers' data from Mendeley. The Spearman correlation was performed among citations and readers for all unique articles for all investigated disciplines. Further, we also looked at the relationships between articles with non-zero readers, as well as articles satisfied by percentile ranking of the top 75 per cent, 50 per cent, and 25 per cent readers. The result indicates large correlations among citations and readers (avg. 0.669) for all investigated disciplines. If we analysed only non-zero readers, as well as a percentile ranking of articles, the correlation results show a decreasing trend. Around 98.57 per cent of articles have at least one reader in Mendeley and AS (97.53 %) discipline has registered the highest one. The CES discipline had registered the largest MRS of 32.25 and MCS of 12.75. Most of the readers come from post-doctoral students and Ph.D. students. The correlation results indicate that the readership statistics should be used as an impact indicator for EPS discipline.