National research
impact indicators derived from citation counts are used by governments
to help assess their national research performance and to identify the
effect of funding or policy changes. Citation counts lag research by
several years, however, and so their information is somewhat out of
date. Some of this lag can be avoided by using readership counts from
the social reference sharing site Mendeley because these accumulate more
quickly than citations. This article introduces a method to calculate
national research impact indicators from Mendeley, using citation counts
from older time periods to partially compensate for international
biases in Mendeley readership. A refinement to accommodate recent
national changes in Mendeley uptake makes little difference, despite
being theoretically more accurate. The Mendeley patterns using the
methods broadly reflect the results from similar calculations with
citations and seem to reflect impact trends about a year earlier.
Nevertheless, the reasons for the differences between the indicators
from the two data sources are unclear. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd.

Citation analysis; Research evaluation; Scientometrics

Citation analysis; Data-sources; Policy changes;
Research evaluation; Research impacts; Research performance;
Scientometrics; Time-periods