Altmetric data quality analysis using Benford’s law

Altmetrics, or alternative metrics, refer to the newer kind of events around scholarly articles, such as the number of times the article is read, tweeted, mentioned in blog posts etc. These metrics have gained a lot of popularity during last few years and are now being collected and used in several ways, ranging from early measure of article impact to a potential indicator of societal relevance of research. However, there are several studies which have cautioned about use of altmetrics on account of quality and reliability of altmetric data, as they may be more prone to manipulations and artificial inflations. This study proposes a framework based on application of Benford’s Law to evaluate the quality of altmetric data. A large sized altmetric data sample is considered and the fits with Benford’s Law are computed. The analysis is performed by doing plots of the empirical data distributions and the theoretical Benford's, and by employing relevant statistical measures and tests. Results for fit on first and second leading digit of altmetric data show conformity to Benford's distribution. To further explore the usefulness of the framework, the altmetric data is subjected to artificial manipulations through a systematic process and the fits to Benford’s law are reassessed to see if there are distortions. The results and analysis suggest that Benford’s Law based framework can be used to test the quality of altmetric data. Relevant implications of the research are discussed.