Statistical analysis
Due to the appearance of novel social platforms where TE research is
shared, we have also performed a statistical analysis including three
different tests: Spearman correlation test (Asuero, Sayago, & Gonzalez,
2006), factorial analysis (Taherdoost, Sahibuddin, & Jalaliyoon, 2014)
and linear regression model (M. Thelwall & Wilson, 2014). In this
sense, the collection of cites using traditional metrics requires
several years and the availability of data provided by Almetrics.com
before 2015 is not extensive due to the platform was founded in 2012.
Thus, the correlation and factorial studies were performed for 2015
metadata. This strategy has been employed in other scientific
disciplines (Mike Thelwall & Nevill, 2018). Furthermore, all citation
and mention counts were transformed with the formula Ln(1+x) before
processing to reduce skewing (Mike Thelwall & Nevill, 2018).
First, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was calculated to verify the dataset
do not follow a normal distribution for the next 16 variables that
overall characterize TE online dimension: 1) WoS citations 2) News, 3)
Blogs, 4) Policy, 5) Twitter, 6) Patents, 7) Peer review, 8) Weibo, 9)
Facebook, 10) Wikipedia, 11) Google, 12) Reddit, 13) F1000, 14) Q&A,
15) Video and 16) Mendeley readers. Furthermore, the Spearman
correlation was obtained for the variables previously described, and the
statistical significance was defined as a probability of less than 0.01.
Second, once the correlation data were obtained, we performed a
factorial analysis. In this sense, factorial analysis is a statistical
model that allows us to identify the common variables or factorsthat could explain the previously observed correlation. Bartlett
Sphericity test (BS) and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) were previously
performed to assess the suitability of factorial analysis (Chan &
Idris, 2017).
Finally, the linear regression model was employed to achieve a more
accurate expression of the relation between TE academic model and the
new social paradigm of it. In this sense, we have developed a
mathematical model exposing the influence of new altmetric scores in TE
classical measure of impact, that is, the number of cites received by TE
original articles. Thus, the linear regression equation constructed for
TE behaviour contents a standard measure of impact as WoS citations and
a group of alternative metrics previously identified in the factorial
analysis. The free software JASP (University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands) was employed to perform all the statistical analyses
(Love et al., 2019).