Investigating Singapore's altmetric landscape

Altmetrics is an emerging measure for academic impact and it is gaining in global importance. In this paper, we analyse the altmetric landscape of Singapore, a young nation with a fast growing international research sector. We aim to find out if the coverage of altmetrics across the different disciplines is increasing along with the fast increase in the amount of research publications in recent years. We also look into how altmetrics relate to traditional citation counts as a measure of research impact. From our results, we see that there is overall an 18% coverage of altmetrics of Singapore publications from 2009 to 2013. The number of publications with available altmetric data has also been increasing over the years for most disciplines. Correlation results between citation counts and altmetrics show medium to low correlations with distinct differences amongst the various disciplines. A high coverage of altmetrics however does not seem to lead to larger correlations with citation counts. Singapore thus remains an intriguing case study to watch in the coming years.