When are readership counts as useful as citation counts? Scopus versus Mendeley for LIS journals

In theory, articles can attract readers on the social reference sharing site M endeley before they can attract citations, so M endeley altmetrics could provide early indications of article impact. This article investigates the influence of time on the number of M endeley readers of an article through a theoretical discussion and an investigation into the relationship between counts of readers of, and citations to, 4 general library and information science ( LIS ) journals. For this discipline, it takes about 7 years for articles to attract as many S copus citations as M endeley readers, and after this the S pearman correlation between readers and citers is stable at about 0.6 for all years. This suggests that M endeley readership counts may be useful impact indicators for both newer and older articles. The lack of dates for individual M endeley article readers and an unknown bias toward more recent articles mean that readership data should be normalized individually by year, however, before making any comparisons between articles published in different years.