Are Altmetrics for you?PlumX at Saint Mary’s

The role of metrics in

institutional evaluation

Bibliometrics

Citation Counts

“The value of information is determined by those

who use it” Eugene Garfield

Journal Impact Factors

Rank & Tenure

Why use alternative

metrics?

Predict citation counts?

Non-journal-based fields:

Medical researchers developing new protocols

Creative artists and writers

Book-intensive disciplines

Business management cases

Inventions and patents

Criticisms of altmetrics

Not a measure of quality: hype, piling on

Apples and oranges; measuring so many

disparate categories is meaningless

Manipulation; robo-tweeting

Empirical evidence is slim

Why altmetrics at SMC?

School of Business and AACSB accreditation

Business Dean asked Business Librarian to

compile data

Book sales

Use of cases in classes

Media mentions

Sedona implementation left out artists,

musicians, novelists

PlumX offered much of what we were seeking

What PlumX measures:

mix of metrics

PlumX at SMC

PlumX at SMC: by School

PlumX at SMC: by School

PlumX at SMC: by School

PlumX at SMC: by Format;

Books

PlumX at SMC: by artifact;

Book

PlumX at SMC: by artifact;

Article

PlumX at SMC: by

Researcher – early career

PlumX at SMC: senior faculty

PlumX at SMC:

Performing Artist

Conclusions and questions

PlumX helps early career researchers and

non-scientists demonstrate their impact better

than traditional metrics

Will tenure committees, accrediting bodies

and granting agencies care?

Will librarians have the time to compile profiles

for all faculty or will we be successful lobbying

for additional staff?

Will faculty and the Provost be impressed

enough to continue to subscribe?

Thank you!

Slides will be posted on SlideShare

Questions or comments?

References

Bornmann, L. (2014). Do altmetrics point to the broader impact of research ? An overview of benefits and disadvantages of altmetrics. Journal of Informetrics, 8(4), 895–903. doi:10.1016/j.joi.2014.09.005

Cameron, B. D. (2005). Trends in the Usage of ISI Bibliometric Data: Uses, Abuses, and Implications. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 5(1), 105–125. doi:10.1353/pla.2005.0003

Galligan, F., & Dyas-Correia, S. (2013). Altmetrics: Rethinking the Way We Measure. Serials Review, 39(1), 56–61. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2013.01.003

Garfield, E. (2005). “The Agony and the Ecstasy: The History and Meaning of the Journal Impact Factor.” International Congress on Peer Review And Biomedical Publication, 1–22. doi:10.1001/jama.295.1.90

Hecht, F., Hecht, B. K., & Sandberg, A. a. (1998). The journal “impact factor”: A misnamed, misleading, misused measure. Cancer Genetics and Cytogenetics, 104(2), 77–81. doi:10.1016/S0165-4608(97)00459-7

Hirsch, J. E. (2007). Does the H index have predictive power? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(49), 19193–19198. doi:10.1073/pnas.0707962104

History of Citation Indexing. (n.d.). Retrieved January 19, 2015, from http://wokinfo.com/essays/history-of-citation-indexing/

Information systems. (2004). In Information Science in Theory and Practice. Ed. Brian C. Vickery and Alina Vickery. (3rd ed., pp. 210–260). Munich: K. G. Saur. Retrieved from http://site.ebrary.com/lib/stmarysca/detail.action?docID=10256701

References

Kousha, K., & Thelwall, M. (2009). Google Book Search: Citation Analysis for Social Science and the Humanities. JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 60(8), 1537–1549. doi:10.1002/asi.21085

Mcnutt, M. (2014). The measure of research merit. Science, 346(6214), 1155. doi:10.1126/science.aaa3796

Nederhof, A. J. (2006). Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the Social Sciences and the Humanities : Scientometrics, 66(1), 81–100. doi:10.1007/s11192-006-0007-2

Thelwall, M., Haustein, S., Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2013). Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services. PLoS ONE, 8(5), 1–7. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064841

Vaughan, L., & Shaw, D. (2003). Bibliographic and Web Citations: What Is the Difference? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(14), 1313–1322. doi:10.1002/asi.10338

Zahedi, Z., Costas, R., & Wouters, P. (2014). How well developed are altmetrics? A cross-disciplinary analysis of the presence of “alternative metrics” in scientific publications. Scientometrics, 101(2), 1491–1513. doi:10.1007/s11192-014-1264-0