Altmetrics: The Basics

Linda M. Galloway, MLISLibrarian for Biology, Chemistry and ForensicsBibliographer for the Sciences & Technology

Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY

SLA 2014Quick Take - #5616

June 8, 2014

What are Altmetrics??“the study of scholarly impact measures based on activity in online tools and environments”

(Priem, Groth, and Taraborelli 2012

citable and accessible products not limited to publications, data sets, software, patents, and copyrights (“Grant Proposal

Guide, Chapter II” 2013)

Quantifying Scholarly Output

via Citation Metrics

Number of PublicationsCitations to Publications

Relative influence of Publications

Documents: 30Citations: 253H-index: 92009-2014, 3/5/2014

Scholarly Metrics as a proxy for Scholarly Influence…

Limitations to Traditional Metrics

• Take a long time to accumulate• Often behind pay walls• Measure influence narrowly• Don’t capture a publication’s impact or

influence in emerging forms of scholarly communication

• Variability depending on database used to calculate metrics

How do you measure researcher/faculty impact?

# Citable products# Citations to those productsh-IndexOther measures of success and influence

Altmetrics

Measure diverse impacts from articles, datasets, blog posts, slide shows, etc.

Beyond citation counts!Readership

ViewsSaves

DownloadsScholarly (or popular) Buzz

What are Altmetrics?Indicators of Research Impact

Journal article use Views, saves, downloads, full-text downloads, readership, usage, etc.

Social Web use Blogs, Twitter (microblogs), social bookmarking, online reference managers

Data & Software use/reuse Copies, citations

Educational resource use/reuse

Presentations, syllabi, course materials

Broader Impacts of research Mass media reporting

Altmetrics can complement and enhance citation metrics!

What can be measured?“Evidence of Use” – http://impactstory.org• # of Tweets • # of “Saves” in online reference managers• Scholarly (and popular) blog interest and

activity• Activity in social networking platforms, tools• Media interest/activity

Altmetrics can help evaluatethe diffusion of research products

How to measure the relative importance of various types of uses, re-uses and discussions of these products?

Scholarly activity

Data & software (re)use

Scholarly commentary

Social activity

Mass media

Schol-arly ac-tivity

Data & software (re)use

Scholarly commentary

Social activ-ity

Mass media

Altmetric Data GroupingsScholarly activity

Data & software (re)useScholarly commentary

Social activityMass media

Meaningful Interactions

CiteULikeDeliciousF1000FigshareGitHubIRMendeleyRedditSlideShareTwitter YouTubeVimeoZotero

What is tracked/counted??

DiscussionsSavesViewsCitationsDownloadsRecommendationsCopiesUsage (clicks)BookmarksEtc.

Altmetrics measures diverse impacts from articles, datasets, blog posts, slide shows, etc.

Altmetric Toolstrack readership & influence

Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers and interests.

CiteULike permits users to store, organize and share scholarly papers

F1000 is a subscription-based recommendation service for curated articles in biology and medicine.

Altmetric Toolstrack readership & influence

Google Scholar Citations is a service that allows authors to track their publications and influence using Google Scholar metrics. Mendeley is a free reference manager and social network that was recently acquired by Elsevier. Mendeley is described as “one of the world’s largest crowd-sourced research catalogs” Zotero is a robust and growing citation management and sharing resource. Collaborators can share libraries of references, etc.

Altmetrics & ResearchersMetrics and their relationship to social media:

• Add value to traditionally published content– Crowdsourced peer review– Expose questions and comments– Enhance worth

• Increase readership• Appear to follow the pattern of traditional

metrics

Make Sense of the Diversity of Research Outputs

Use an aggregator!

Harvest dataAutomatic updates

Showcase scholarly influence

Tools to gather data

Commercial• Altmetric.com –owned by Macmillan Publishers

(also owns the Nature Publishing Group). “Provides article level metrics for researchers and publishers”

• Plum Analytics – startup co-founded by former Summon developers; recently acquired by EBSCO. Collects article-level data for use by different constituencies to compare individuals, departments, universities.

Tools to gather data

Commercial• Mendeley.com – Reference manager, .pdf organizer &

social networking tool for researchers/authors. Collects & displays altmetrics. Recently purchased by Elsevier.

“Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) is an analytics tool built on top of Mendeley that helps librarians, research directors and other admins to understand the research activity and scholarship output of their community and to facilitate collaboration within it (Mendeley.com).”

Tools to gather data

Non-profit

• ImpactStory – designed for the individual researcher, tools to visualize impact of research products. Helps “researchers to tell data-driven stories about their impacts” (ImpactStory, 2014).– Open source; data, code & governance all public

Images: blog.impactstory.org, chemconnector.com

ImpactStory

Valid data = Valid metricsAccurate attribution and discovery of research products is

the most important consideration for all authors.

• Scholarly authors are assigned many identifiers such as Scopus Author ID, Web of Science Researcher ID, institutional ID’s

• Scholars should register for an ORCID - Open Researcher Identifier – this ID is supported by many publishers & platforms.

• Scholars can claim and make public their Google Scholar profile, and/or keep an institution profile updated.

Thank you!!Linda GallowayContributors: Janet PeaseAnne Rauh

Syracuse University Libraries

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