altmetrics in practice: our experience

Altmetrics in practice: our experience

Euan Adie, altmetric.com

SciELO 15, 24 October 2013

Several different tools available

What are “altmetrics”?

o “alternative metrics”

o new ways of measuring different, non-traditional forms of impact, potentially of non-traditional outputs.

o “alternative to only using citations”, not “alternative to citations”.

o complementary to traditional citation-based analysis.

Every researcher is a communicator

Within academia

Presentations and seminarsFunding and ethics applications

Academic booksJournal articles and posters

Term papers and essaysMeetings and conferences

Correspondence

Within society

Speaking at public eventsBooks for general audiencesPressSocial mediaBlogsPolicy documents

We should measure both

Download countsPage views

Mentions in news reportsMentions in social media

Mentions in blogsReference manager readers

… etc.

Journal Impact FactorCitation counts

New perspectives of impact

ACADEMIC IMPACT SOCIETAL IMPACT

Alternative metrics“altmetrics”

+Traditional metricsTraditional metrics

One available tool.We are used a lot by publishers, now some institutions too.We serve ± 2.5 million requests a day.

Where are the readers?

Who are the readers?

What’s interesting about this kind of data?

Altmetrics tools are at version 0.1

Altmetrics tools don’t (yet) provide good metrics for

impact

BUT

They can help you find evidence of impact, successes

An article on the ecological impacts of the Fukushima nuclear accident.• > 1,859 twitter accounts

shared, combined follower count of 2.5M.

• 68% of tweets sent from Japan.

• 77% of tweets from members of the public.

2012, Scientific Reports 2, 570Figure 1

Evidence of public outreach?

A different example, from the USP

Evidence research has reached patients?

Altmetric score

Quantifying attention

Note that we can measure attention, but…

Positive? Negative?

For scientific reasons?Or because the title is funny?Is 364 good or bad anyway?

Context is everything

In general, altmetrics numbers…

X Don’t represent the quality of research.

Don’t indicate the quality of individual researchers.Don’t tell the whole story – always look for qualitative data as well

X

X

Why score at all? To allow ranking

What should we be measuring beyond attention?

Question for the academic community.

Problems

Problems

• 30 – 40% of recent biomedical papers will have Altmetric attention. But < 10% in social sciences.

Problems

• 30 – 40% of recent biomedical papers will have Altmetric attention. But < 10% in social sciences.

• Tools have subtle bias: data sources are mainly those popular in US, Europe

http://am.ascb.org/dora/

Thanks for listening!

Supported by:

E-mail: euan@altmetric.com

Twitter: @altmetric

Website: altmetric.com