Usage metrics vs classical metrics: analysis of Russia’s research output

This paper discusses the results of a pilot project investigating Russian scholarly publications using the altmetric indicators “Usage Count Last 180 days” (U1) and “Usage Count Since 2013” (U2) introduced by Web of Science. We explored the relationship between citation impact and both types of usage counts. The data set consisted of 37,281 records (publications) indexed by SCI-E in 2015. Seven broad research areas were selected to observe citation patterns and usage counts. A significant difference was found between mean citations and mean usage counts (U2) in a few research areas. We discovered a significant Kendall rank correlation between the citation metrics and usage metrics at the article level. This correlation is particularly strong for the longer period usage metric (U2). We also analyzed the relationship between usage metrics and traditional journal-level citation metrics. Very weak correlation was observed.