Do altmetric correlate with citation? : A study based on PLOS ONE journal

Altmetrics or alternative metrics is a new kind of metrics originated at 2010 aiming at complimenting the traditional metrics. Altmetrics can provide a better view on the influvance of research or the reach of research on people. The major objective of the study was to identify the correlation between altmetrics score and citation. For this altmetrics data and citations for the articles on “Ebola” disease published in PLOS ONE journal during the years 2010-2015 were collected. The correlation between the altmetrics scores like saves, views, Mendeley and twitter are compared with bibliometric score citation. The result shows that all the altmetric scores except twitter have good correlation with traditional bibliometric citation.