Measuring Research Performance of Indian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) through Altmetrics: A Data Carpentry Approach

Abstract Altmetrics is an interesting complementary tool that assesses the productivity of individual authors, journals, institutions, disciplines, and geographic regions in the socio-academic web space. It provides a more comprehensive and extensive purview of how research is disseminated through the academic community in a multifaceted way. This research aims to assess the research impact of the top 20 NIRF-ranking research institutions in India using altmetrics. The research data have been collected from four different databases, namely Scopus, Altmetric.com, Mendeley.com, and Unpaywall.org, through REST/API calls using a data carpentry tool called OpenRefine. The observed data is analyzed using computational methods, and categorical OA altmetrics advantages (COAAA) are introduced to investigate OA (dis)advantages categorically. Findings reflect that 29.51% of articles have been covered in altmetrics and 96.06% of publications in Mendeley. The overall coverage of altmetrics events still needs to be improved and indicates an increasing trend compared to the past. The significant presence of events, like Twitter, Blogs, News, and Facebook, across the institutions has been observed. Moreover, the coverage of OA articles in altmetrics is considerably higher than that of non-OA articles. Among OA categories, gold OA has the most coverage in altmetrics. All Indian Institute of Medical Science Delhi (AIIMS-D) has held the first position in terms of coverage, while the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT-H) ranked top by correlation (rho) values among those institutions. Almost positive correlations are observed between most of the variables. The overall research results suggest discipline- and institute-specific considerations are pivotal when evaluating institutions' productivity using altmetrics.