On the Alignment of Post-Publication Reviews & Bibliometric and Altmetric Impact -- A Case Study on Expert Statements from the Science Media Center Germany
Dirk Tunger, Philipp Schaer
Abstract
In the context of academic publishing and peer review, this study investigates the relationship between post-publication expert evaluations, their agreement levels, and the subsequent scientific and public recognition of the reviewed research. Using expert statements from the Science Media Center Germany as a dataset, we analyze Research in Context reviews to examine the alignment between qualitative post-publication assessments and bibliometric as well as altmetric indicators. We employ a Large Language Model to translate unstructured expert reviews into a structured rating scheme. Furthermore, we correlate these evaluations with citation counts from the Web of Science and alternative impact metrics such as the Altmetric Attention Score, news mentions, and Mendeley readership statistics from the Altmetric Explorer. We investigate the alignment of positive or critical post-publication reviews and high or low citation or altmetric counts.