Purpose: This paper aims to examine the effects of alternative publishing models such as open access practices which make scholarly output assessment easier from a Scientometrics point of view, precisely called ALTMETRICS. Methodology: Using bibliometrics and scientometrics, the characteristics of ALTMETRICS articles were studied regarding subject, the channel of publication, year of publishing, country, and readership in various social media were investigated. The comparison of the ALTMETRICS score and their citation status were also examined in the current study. Findings: The study showed that more than half of the articles (53 articles) were in medical and health sciences. Other articles included were from fields of biology (20), Geology and Environmental Sciences (9), Social sciences (8), Research and development and Physics (2), and one in Information and Computer Science. Most articles (16) were published in Nature. Lancet published 12, the British Medical Journal 6, the Science and JAMA Magazine 5 articles respectively. The publication rates of articles were not the same in all months. The United States (46%), the United Kingdom (53%), and Canada (1%) published most of the top articles, respectively. Conclustion: Researchers in a variety of fields use a variety of tools to provide their research outcomes and deliver their scientific message in plain language to the public in various ways.

Introduction: Despite the advantages of ALTMETRICS in research evaluation, it encounters many challenges as a nascent field impacted by web dynamism. The present study attempted to identify the challenges of employing ALTMETRICS’ in evaluating research and to highlight some of the features that required evaluation and validation.Methods: The present communication was a basic descriptive research, applying a qualitative thematic analysis method. It studies the research and theoretical works on citation and altmetric indicators in order to extract the indicators’ weaknesses and challenges.results: The findings led to the identification of many challenges including possibility of indicator manipulation and false improvement, inability to differentiate between positive or negative credits, unbalanced coverage of materials, incompatibility, ambiguities and diversity in the sources of social web, biases, fluctuations, variable nature of social web, equating all citations, lack of standardization, inability to determine the usage type and contexts, and finally inability to measure the quality.Conclusion: Although the ALTMETRICS have many unique strengths that can boost citation analysis, it has several fundamental weaknesses regarding its concepts, services and resources that requires its cautious and conscious use, otherwise its premature and hasty usage would distort research evaluation results.

Purpose: The current research was conducted to investigate open-access articles written by Iranian researchers. This study examines the amount of scientific impact (citation indices) and social impact (ALTMETRICS indices) of Iranian open-access scientific outputs. The results of this research can provide information about the effectiveness of open-access scientific publications to managers and policymakers in the field of science and technology so that, while being aware of the current situation, they can make the necessary decisions and policies to improve the quality of scientific outputs. Methodology: The present research is a descriptive study that has been conducted using scientometrics and ALTMETRICS indicators. The research population comprised of 119168 scientific outputs published by Iranian researchers in open-access journals and indexed by the Web of Science. Data were collected using two products of Clarivate Analytics, namely Web of Science and InCites. Also, the ALTMETRICS Explorer, a service provided by Altmetric Institute was used for altmetric data collection. Finally, SPSS software was used to perform the correlation test, and because the values of the variables were not normal (the significance of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, p0. 01), Spearman's correlation test was used (significance level 0. 01). Other research data were analyzed using Excel software (descriptive statistics). Findings: Open-access articles by Iranian researchers grew by 99. 9% and the largest number of open-access articles by Iranian researchers have been published in journals with the gold open-access model. Islamic Azad University, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, and Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences had the highest number of articles in open-access journals. Also, the largest number of articles by Iranian researchers have been published in medicine general internal journals (9342), chemistry multidisciplinary (6409), pharmacology pharmacy (5714), and mathematics (5235). The least number of open-access articles have been published in the subject areas of music (1), folklore (1), film, radio, and television (1). While the study of the received citations and the citation rate of the open access outputs of Iranian researchers indicated that the articles published in quality journals are of higher citation, about %40. 05 of scientific output has been published in journals without quartile, %15. 98 in Q4, %15. 5in Q2, %14. 34 in Q3, and % 14. 11in Q1 journals. The findings showed that Iranian open-access scientific productions have been mentioned a total of 1, 364, 087 times in different media. The highest amount of attention and mention happened on Twitter (194, 463), news (18, 483), and Facebook (10, 670). The results of correlation tests revealed statistically significant, positive, and poor relationships between the number of citations, altmetric score, mentions on Twitter, mentions on Facebook, and Mendeley readers. Conclusion: Medical sciences universities of the country have contributed more to the publication of open-access scientific outputs, among the top 20 universities in the country in terms of the number of articles, the names of 10 medical sciences universities are visible. One of the reasons for this is the very important role of open access to medical articles and findings in increasing public awareness and health. With the publication of open access, the speed of access to the latest research and awareness of diseases will increase, and it will increase the level of health, and longevity in all countries of the world. On the other hand, the publication of a significant part of scientific outputs in Non-JCR indexed journals is very worth considering. Most of these journals are indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index. Gold open-access journals often receive very high fees for publishing articles, it is highly necessary to plan to inform researchers about the quality of these journals.

The present study atempts to explain the strengths of ALTMETRICS and compare them with those of citation-based indicators, and thereby reveal opportunities provided by social web in research evaluation. Applying a qualitative thematic analysis method, it studied the contents of research and theoretical works about the citation and ALTMETRICS indicators in order to extract their authors’ views about the indicators’ strengths. The findings led to the identification of many strengths of ALTMETRICS compared to the citation analysis including openness and ease of access, non-dependence on commercial databases, impact assessment of preprints, measuring different types of research impact, promoting peer-review processes, reducing language biases, impact assessment of young researchers, accelerating the evaluation process, calculating the impacts on all kinds of audiences, predicting the future research impact, evaluating the impact of uncited papers, inter-disciplinary comparisons, evaluating a wide variety of sources and researchers’ outputs, and analyzing low-cited or slowlycited subjecs. Althougth both indices have many strengths, ALTMETRICS has more that can compensate for the weaknesses of citation analysis. As a result, using them together can make the results of research evaluation more reliable and increase their accuracy and precision.