altmetrics for e rand l 2015
TRANSCRIPT
Using Altmetrics in Academic Libraries
ER&L, February 25, 2015 Sarah W. Sutton
[email protected]@sarahwws
Altmetrics
= Alternative metrics
“Metrics that are alternative to the established citation counts and usage stats and/or metrics about alternative research outputs as opposed to journal articles” (NISO, 2014, p. 4)
Overview
• Definitions
• Evaluation
• Discovery
• Advantages & disadvantages
Evaluation
• Collection development & management
• Library publishing
• Repositories
• Research support
• Return on investment & Institutional advancement
Collection development
“If you’re a librarian and you have a limited serials budget, knowing which publications are read by your patrons can help you make better decisions about where you subscribe. Finding out what researchers are interested in and talking about with one another can help steer you into new areas for acquisition, letting you meet their needs before they even know they have them” (Crotty, 2014, p.145)
“providing an altmetric overlay for journal usage that will complement the standard COUNTER statistics provided by publishers” (Galligan & Dyas-Corriea, 2013)
Collection development
Collection development
Library Publishing & Repositories
• Altmetrics as a measure of OA content
• Promote repository content
• Persuade depositors
• Persuade funders
• Measure community engagement
Repository platforms providing altmetrics
Metric Digital Commons DSPace Eprints
Download counts x x x
Search terms x
Referral links x
Metrics communicated by email x
Includes a federated search & discovery x
Number of visitors x
Pageviews x
Bounce rate x
Partnership with Almtetric.com x
Citation metrics x* x** x**
Social media mentions x* x**
* via Almetric.com
** with additional plug-in
Source: Konkiel & Sherer (2013)
Researcher support
Libraries have a “"long-standing tradition of collaborating with academic departments and their research faculty to demonstrate the impact of their scholarship” (ACRL, 2014).
Researcher support
• Who is interacting with a scholar’s research output?
• What kinds of content are popular?
• How is a scholar’s work being received by her peers?
• Fully documenting publication in non-traditional venues & non-traditional forms of research out-put
• Leverage publication for promotion & tenure
ROI & Institutional Advancement
“Libraries are in a unique position to help facilitate an informed dialogue with the various constituencies that will intersect with altmetrics on campus” (Lapinski, Piwowar, & Priem, 2013).
ROI & Institutional Advancement
• Showcase institutional scholarship to internal and external stakeholders
• Demonstrate the impact of faculty research to trustees, state legislatures, etc.
• Recruitment of faculty & students
• Illustrate the potential impact of donations
Discovery
“Altmetrics can play an important role as a discovery tool, in particularly for newly published content where citations are not yet available” (NISO, 2014, p. 7)
Discovery
• Identifying scholarly content
– In unconventional formats
– Recently published
• Identifying creators of scholarly content
• Contextualized altmetrics
Limitations
• Gaming• Popularity v. impact • Replication• Complete data• Data reliability• Critical mass• Inapplicable to traditional publishing formats• Imperfect proxies of quality• Lack of peer-review or its equivalent• “Fire-hose of data” (Crotty, 2014)
• No “one-stop shop”…yet
FMI
References
• ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee. (2014). Top trends in academic libraries: A review of the trends and issues affecting academic libraries in higher education. College & Research Libraries News, 75(6), 294–302.
• Crotty, D. (2014a). Altmetrics: Finding meaningful needles in the data haystack. Serials Review, 40(3), 141–146. doi:10.1080/00987913.2014.947839
• Crotty, D. (2014b, May 1). Altmetrics: Mistaking the means for the end. Retrieved from http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/05/01/altmetrics-mistaking-the-means-for-the-end/
• 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
• Haustein, S., Peters, I., Sugimoto, C. R., Thelwall, M., & Larivière, V. (2013). Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature. arXiv:1308.1838 [cs]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.1838
• Konkiel, S. (2013). Altmetrics a 21st-century solution to determining research quality. Online Searcher, 37(4), 11–15.
• Konkiel, S., & Scherer, D. (2013). New opportunities for repositories in the age of altmetrics. Bulletin of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 39(4), 22–26.
• Lapinski, S., Piwowar, H., & Priem, J. (2013). Riding the crest of the altmetrics wave. College & Research Libraries News, 74(6), 292–300.
• NISO. (2014). NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Project. Retrieved from http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/altmetrics_initiative/
• Sutton, S. (2013). A model for electronic resources value assessment. Serials Librarian, 64(1-4), 245–253. doi:10.1080/0361526X.2013.760417
Using Altmetrics in Academic Libraries
Please feel free to contact me:
Sarah W. Sutton
@sarahwws