Reading: Social bookmarking helps with Journal evaluation

Haustein, Stefanie and Siebenlist, Tobias.
Applying social bookmarking data to evaluate journal usage. Journal of Informetrics. Article in Press, Corrected Proof.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2011.04.002

It has been shown that bookmarks of journal articles can be analyzed to measure journal usage independently from publishers. Data can be extracted about how often journal articles are used on a global scale. Tags assigned by users can give a new perspective on journal content and visualize trends of journal perception from the readers’ point of view.
By bookmarking and tagging articles, academic prosumers generate new information about resources, i.e. usage statistics and content description of scientific journals.
Given the lack of global download statistics, the authors propose the application of social bookmarking data to journal evaluation.

For a set of 45 physics journals all 13,608 bookmarks from CiteULike, Connotea and BibSonomy to documents published between 2004 and 2008 were analyzed.
This article explores bookmarking data in STM and examines in how far it can be used to describe the perception of periodicals by the readership.

Four basic indicators are defined, which analyze different aspects of usage: Usage Ratio, Usage Diffusion, Article Usage Intensity and Journal Usage Intensity. Tags are analyzed to describe a reader-specific view on journal content.

Social bookmarking in academics is however still in its infancy. Inconsistent and incomplete entries made retrieval cumbersome and a matching to other bibliographic data necessary. Metadata quality is crucial for the services to successfully keep old and gain new customers. So it was surprising to discover, that the entries were of bad quality…

 CiteULike also had the largest retrieval functionality and most complete metadata…
Mendeley looks like a suitable and applicable source for future usage-based journal evaluations.