Altmetrics

Altmetric for Scopus Are you interested in contributing to HLWIKI International – hlwiki.ca? contact: dean.giustini@ubc.ca To browse other articles on a range of HSL topics, see the A-Z index. Last Update 21 May 2013 Introduction See also Bibliometrics | Data science portal | Impact factors | FigShare | Scopus vs. Web of Science | ImpactStory | Utopia Documents | Webometrics " ... in growing numbers, scholars are moving their everyday work to the web. Online reference managers Zotero and Mendeley each claim to store over 40 million articles (making them substantially larger than PubMed); as many as a third of scholars are on Twitter, and a growing number tend scholarly blogs...." Altmetrics (alternate or alternative metrics) is the study of newer web-based scholarly metrics that consider the total influence of authors through blogposts, social media, Twitter and Slideshare, among a range of other tools. Social engagement data is culled from the total viewings of articles, retweets of publications and knowledge objects, mentions on social media and aggregated as a measure of total impact. In other words, altmetrics looks beyond traditional metrics at the social web and mines information from it for analysis and detailed examination. An emerging area of the alternative metrics discourse is the idea of owning your social data. The idea is that connecting with others socially is part of our work as academics, and we shouldn't have to trade away our personal information to participate in social networks. The vision for altmetrics is summarized in this SPARC altmetrics primer. Background The exponential increase in scholarly output has created a deluge of data on the web. There are concerns that information is swamping scholarly publishing channels and the means of peer review and post-publication. To complicate matters, an increase in the use of web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, Mendeley and social media such as blogs and wikis present opportunities to create new information filters and improve knowledge management. The metrics based on diverse sets of "social sources" may yet yield a broader, richer and more timely view of current and potential scholarly impact. Some authors, who have done preliminary work in this emerging field, have dubbed the phenomenon “altmetrics”, or alternative metrics. Alternative metrics (metrics at an article or interaction level on the web) is a type of altmetrics or total metrics. Despite the growing speculation and early exploratory investigation into the value of altmetrics, there still remains little concrete, objective research into the properties of these metrics: their validity, their potential value and flaws, and what relationship they have to established scholarly measures. Nor has there been any large umbrella to bring these multiple approaches together. That said, some scholarly tracking tools have implemented early altmetric features; see Scopus altmetrics. For the latest generation of altmetrics software, see ImpactStory. Presentations on altmetrics see also Beyond Publish or Perish: Alternative Metrics for Scholarship Password: altmetrics Priem J, Taraborelli D, Groth P, Neylon C. Alt-metrics: a manifesto. 26 October 2010. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto Altmetric tools See also Altmetrics.org for a list of other altmetric tools Altmetric track and analyze online activity; Altmetric score is a quantative measure of quality and quantity of attention given to articles Bernard Becker Medical Library Project, Assessing the Impact of Research a model for assessment of research impact ImpactStory uncover the invisible impacts of your research; co-authored by UBC postdoc Heather Piwowar combining internet metrics and traditional scholarly metrics Peer Evaluation altmetric platform designed as an open peer review service where researchers curate their own peer review process PlumX PlumAnalytics making research more assessable and accessible ReaderMeter research impact, crowdsourced experimental tool that uses readership metrics derived from Mendeley, an online reference management application with social networking features Wikipedia Cite-o-Meter, Top 100 publishers by citations in Wikipedia provides a conservative estimate of # of times journal articles from particular publishers are cited in the 100 largest Wikipedias; uses API and searches for occurences of a DOI prefix in the main namespace Jason Priem, UNC-Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science Check out Jason Priem's website, and posts re: a study of scholars on Twitter and what it means for altmetrics, and the future of scholarly publication: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/11/21/altmetrics-twitter/ Jason's altmetrics presentations are worth a close look: “Toward a Second Revolution: Data citation, altmetrics, and the Decoupled Journal” Article level metrics & altmetrics Alternative metrics (often at an article-level) are a type of altmetrics or total metrics. Generally, altmetrics refers to usage metrics such as views or mentions on social media. The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) started publishing article-level metrics a few years ago, including views and tweets ("tweetations"). Tweets were later found to predict highly-cited items leading Eysenbach to propose "twimpact factors", ie., the number of tweets within the first 7 days of publication; and twindex, the rank percentile of the twimpact factor of an article compared to similar articles within the same journal (Eysenbach, 2011). JMIR publishes its article-level metrics (including the twimpact factor) on its Top Articles page. The Public Library of Science also introduced article level metrics on every article in all of their titles. Bibliometrics and scientometrics Bibliometrics and scientometrics are two closely-related fields that aim to measure scientific publications and science in general. A lot of the research that falls under this topic involves citation analysis, or examining how scholars cite one another in publications. Author citation data can show a lot about scholar networks and scholarly communication, linkages between scholars, and the development of areas of knowledge over time. Modern scientometrics is based on the work of Derek J de Solla Price and Eugene Garfield. References Altmetrics for Librarians and Institutions: Part I: Altmetrics landscape, impact and value. SWETs blog. August 2012. Chalmers I, Altman DG, McHaffie H, Owens N, Cooke RWI. Data sharing among data monitoring committees and responsibilities to patients and science. Trials. 2013;14:102. Colaco M, Svider PF, Mauro KM, Eloy JA, Jackson-Rosario I. Is there a relationship between NIH funding and research impact in academic urology? J Urology. 1 March 2013. Eysenbach G. Can tweets predict citations? 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Impact of open access and social media on scientific research. J Participat Med. 2012 Jul 18;4:e15. Piwowar HA, Day RS, Fridsma DB. Sharing detailed research data is associated with increased citation rate. PLoS One. 2007 Mar 21;2(3):e308. Piwowar HA. Who shares? Who doesn't? Factors associated with openly archiving raw research data. PLoS One. 2011;6(7):e18657. Piwowar HA, Vision TJ, Whitlock MC. Data archiving is a good investment. Nature. 2011 May 19;473(7347):285. Piwowar Heather. 31 Flavors of research impact through #altmetrics. ResearchMix blog. 31 January 2012 Priem J, Taraborelli D, Groth P, Neylon C. Alt-metrics: a manifesto. Priem J, Hemminger B. Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new metrics of scholarly impact on the social web. First Monday. 2010;15(7). Priem J, Costello KL. How and why scholars cite on Twitter. Proc Am Soc Info Sci Tech. 2010;47:1–4. Priem J, Costello K, Dzuba T. Prevalence and use of Twitter among scholars. 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