Altmetrics at institutional level: Visibility on the web of the scientific production of Spanish universities from Altmetric.com

This study focuses on the publications of Spanish universities indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) during 2014-2016 (125,824 articles) and calculates 17 indicators with Altmetric.com. Three objectives have been established: 1) to offer a general perspective of the altmetrics in Spanish universities, 2) to determine the coverage of Altmetric.com in the Spanish case and 3) to establish which are the most relevant altmetrics. The results show that 42% of the articles in the WoS are indexed in Altmetric.com. The indicators generated by Twitter, the digital press, Facebook and Wikipedia explain 82% of the variance. As conclusions, it is pointed out that: a) publishing in high impact journals and in areas such as Medicine and Biology helps universities to obtain better altmetrics; and b) a small number of indicators is enough to determine the altmetric impact.