ABSTRACT
Research published on COVID-19 pandemic offers the unexpected opportunity to overcome some of the challenges for both the altmetrics and the bibliometrics indicators with respect to the heterogeneity of the data under evaluation and it presents us with a case study for investigating the correlation amoSng altmetrics and scientific impact indicators. There is extensive early research on COVID-19, some of them highly cited and classified as hot papers in Web of Science. In this study 126 journal articles on early COVID-19 research, indexed in Web of Science were analyzed to determine if the altmetrics are related to the scientific impact of the paper, measured by peer assessment and bibliometric indicators. Relationships and underlying dimensions of the traditional measurements and altmetrics are investigated through principal component analysis, factor analysis and correlations. Overall, the results show that Mendeley counts (reads) indicate their potential use for predicting WoS citations, the Altmetric attention score, shows a relatively low correlation with the later WoS citations, while Google Scholar, while used with caution, can be used as a predictor of future citations counts in WoS.