Global country-level patterns of Mendeley readership performance compared to citation performance : does Mendeley provide a different picture on the impact of scientific publications across countries?

As bibliographic reference managers like Mendeley made their data openly available, it became possible to track where in the world research was being saved from. This data offered the opportunity to better understand how research circulates at a global scale with measures that go beyond citations. This paper explores this circulation by studying fluctuations in rankings between countries when they are based on mean normalized citation scores (MNCS) or on mean normalized Mendeley readership scores (MNRS). Results show that both indicators are moderately correlated at the country level, but that countries from the Global South (namely African and South American countries) perform better when ranked by Mendeley readership than by citations. In addition, publications from South America and Africa tend to have a lower citation impact compared to those from Europe and North America, even when compared with publications that have the same number of readers. These results suggest that the indicator chosen (i.e., citations or Mendeley readers) creates different (dis)advantages among scholarly actors (e.g. countries, research organizations, journals, etc.). It also hints at the need to establish evaluation frameworks that consider that different metrics play different roles across institutional and geographical boundaries. We conclude by proposing further ways of exploring these metrics.