Do Blog Citations Correlate With a Higher Number of Future Citations? Research Blogs as a Potential Source for Alternative Metrics

Journal-based citations are an important source of data for impact indices. However, the impact of journal articles extends beyond formal scholarly discourse. Measuring online scholarly impact calls for new indices, complementary to the older ones. This article examines a possible alternative metric source, blog posts aggregated at ResearchBlogging.org, which discuss peer-reviewed articles and provide full bibliographic references. Articles reviewed in these blogs therefore receive "blog citations." We hypothesized that articles receiving blog citations close to their publication time receive more journal citations later than the articles in the same journal published in the same year that did not receive such blog citations. Statistically significant evidence for articles published in 2009 and 2010 support this hypothesis for seven of 12 journals (58%) in 2009 and 13 of 19 journals (68%) in 2010. We suggest, based on these results, that blog citations can be used as an alternative metric source.