  The popular social media platforms are now making it possible for scholarly
articles to be shared rapidly in different forms, which in turn can
significantly improve the visibility and reach of articles. Many authors are
now utilizing the social media platforms to disseminate their scholarly
articles (often as pre- or post- prints) beyond the paywalls of journals. It is
however not very well established if the level of social media coverage and
attention of scholarly articles is same across all research disciplines or
there exist discipline-wise variations. This paper aims to explore the
disciplinary variations in coverage and altmetric attention by analyzing a
significantly large amount of data from Web of Science and Altmetric.com.
Results obtained show interesting patterns. Medical Sciences and Biology are
found to account for more than 50% of all instances in Altmetrics. In terms of
coverage, disciplines like Biology, Medical Science and Multidisciplinary
Sciences have more than 60% of their articles covered in Altmetrics, whereas
disciplines like Engineering, Mathematics and Material Science have less than
25% of their articles covered in Altmetrics. The coverage percentages further
vary across different altmetric platforms, with Twitter and Mendeley having
much higher overall coverage than Facebook and News. Disciplinary variations in
coverage are also found in different altmetric platforms, with variations as
large as 7.5% for Engineering discipline to 55.7% for Multidisciplinary in
Twitter. The paper also looks into the possible role of source of publication
in altmetric coverage level of articles. Interestingly, some journals are found
to have a higher altmetric coverage in comparison to the average altmetric
coverage level of that discipline.
