Evaluation of Reader Perception by Using Tags from Social Bookmarking Systems

The traditional way of evaluating scientific journals is citation analysis. Recent studies have emphasized the importance of including the readers’ perspectives by analyzing download and click rates. Against the background of global download statistics still being inaccessible, Haustein et al. (2010) introduce social bookmarking data as an alternative source to measure journal perception. Social bookmarking services do not only allow users to store and share scientific literature on the web but also to index them with freely chosen tags. It is assumed that, if cumulated on journal level, these tags reflect a reader-specific view on journal content, which differs from traditional indexing methods. This contribution aims to follow up on this assumption and investigate the readers’ tagging behavior in greater detail. In order to discover differences or similarities in contrast to common indexing methods, tags are compared to title and abstract terms, author keywords, indexer-generated Inspec subject headings and automatically generated KeyWords PlusTM from Web of Science (WoS). Data is cleaned extensively and similarities are computed on the level of single documents to gain exact results.

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