Beyond the Impact Factor: AltmetricsA look at altmetrics and their growing significance to researchers

Hardy SchwammResearch Data and Repository Manager

h.schwamm@lancaster.ac.ukTel. (01524) 594 116

1. What are Altmetrics and why are they useful?2. The Altmetrics Landscape– Altmetric– Impactstory– PlumX

3. Benefits and Concerns4. Lancaster University and Altmetrics

Overview

• NO ONE CAN READ EVERYTHING. We rely on filters to make sense of the scholarly literature, but the narrow, traditional filters are being swamped. However, the growth of new, online scholarly tools allows us to make new filters; these altmetrics reflect the broad, rapid impact of scholarship in this burgeoning ecosystem. We call for more tools and research based on altmetrics.

Altmetrics manifesto

• Bibliometrics• Impact Factor• Eigenfactor

Altmetrics is not…Bibliometrics is a set of methods to quantitatively analyse academic literature.Citation analysis

In any given year, the Impact Factor of a journal is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years.

The Eigenfactor score is a rating of the total importance of a scientific journal. Journals are rated according to the number of incoming citations, with citations from highly ranked journals weighted higher than those from poorly ranked journals.

Measuring multidimensional impact

Publications

• Citations• ”Impact”• Repositories

Internet

• Twitter• Facebook• Wikipedia

Usage

• Mendeley• CiteULike

News media

• Newspaper• Television• Blogs

Research process

• Presentations

• Videos• Datasets

Research

Altmetrics

• Umbrella term for new metrics applied to measure impact of research outputs

• The term Altmetrics was proposed in 2010• Open (scripts and algorithms that collect it)• Various websites and projects are calculating altmetrics• Several publishers have started providing such information to

readers, including BioMed Central, Nature Publishing Group, PLOS (Public Library of Science) and Elsevier.

What are Altmetrics?

Metrics based on the social web

What are Altmetrics?

Rodgers & Barbrow 2013

How many times an output • article, website, blog, dataset, grey literature, software, etc.has been:

• Viewed (Publisher websites, Dryad)• Downloaded (Slideshare, publisher websites, Dryad)• Cited (PubMed, CrossRef, Scopus, Wikipedia, DOI, Web of Science)• Reused/Adapted (Github)• Shared (Facebook, Twitter)• Bookmarked (Mendeley, CiteULike, Delicious)• Commented upon (Twitter, Mendeley, blogs, publisher websites, Wikipedia,

Faculty of 1000)

What do Altmetrics measure?

Measure social reach in online environments

The Altmetrics landscape

• Altmetric gathers mentions of scholarly output in social and traditional media, government documents,: number of Tweets, Facebook pages, mentions on Google+, Reddit, blogs or news outlets, and any readers on Mendeley, or CiteULike connected to each individual publication.

• Article-centric approach • By 15 August 2014 Altmetric had tracked 2,310,844 articles

across all journals.• Altmetric score is a weighted count• Examples: Nature, Glasgow Enlighten

• Started in 2011• Nonprofit organisation funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the

National Science Foundation and subscription fees ($5 per month. 1 month trial).

• Focuses on metrics of individual researchers. They need to create profile with their research output and Impactstory will provide metrics to create an “impact profile” (CV).

• Uses “percentiles” to measure impact.• Imports metric data from many sources but currently not from

Google Scholar and Web of Science.• Example Profile

• PlumX tracks five types of impact about any of 20 types of scholarly content, from articles and abstracts to source code and videos.

• Impact metrics include usage statistics such as downloads, views, holdings at libraries and ILL requests

• PlumX widgets can be added to repositories• Examples: Article in IR University of Pittsburgh, PlumX

researcher profile, institutional profile (Smithsonian)

From niso.org (pdf)

• Example of a publisher using Article-Level Metrics Information• Metrics “help users determine the value of an article to them

and to their scientific community”• PLOS mentions “known issues” such as robot activity and

other ways that affects usage statistics• Example article: Jealousy in Dogs

PLOS

• Altmetrics offer researchers a way to showcase the impact of papers that have not yet gathered many citations, and to demonstrate engagement with the public

• Offer additional measures of influence• Bridge informal academic discourse with the formal output of research• Altmetrics can encourage a focus on public engagement• Altmetrics empower publication choice

– highlighting work based on its post-publication impact, rather than the title of the journal

– New journals won’t have to wait two years to get an impact factor before they can compete.

• Use Altmetrics to find success stories that you can mention in your CVs or on your websites.

Altmetrics benefits for researchers

• Usefulness of Altmetrics is controversial. What do metrics actually mean?• Altmetrics are a developing, non-standardised set of tools, methods and

theories• Altmetrics don’t always distinguish between positive and negative

attention.• A mediocre paper in a popular field will receive more attention than a

first-rate paper in a small field. • Most articles receive little (if any) attention in the wider community,

leading to scores of zero• Many article-level metrics sources are not accessible (e.g. Google

Scholar, Twitter only for 30 days)

Concerns

• Currently no Altmetrics products are being used at Lancaster, however, the Library and RSO are aware of Altmetrics and will consider their use.

• There will be a product presentation of Altmetrics to Librarians, ISS and others soon.

• Altmetrics could be displayed using Pure and Lancaster’s Research Portal (to the public?, researchers only?).

Lancaster University and Altmetrics

• Article-level metrics measure the impact of scholarly articles and other products (e.g., datasets, presentations) on the social web.

• These measures of scholarly impact are quickly gaining ground as evidenced by the presented companies.

• Article-level metrics as a field is quite young and, therefore, has some issues to work out. It is hard to predict what people will want to do with article-level metrics data in the future.

• Should Altmetrics be included in decisions on grants, hiring and tenure?

Conclusions

• Roberta Kwok: Altmetrics make their mark, Nature, 2013, Vol.500(7463), pp.491-3. http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7463-491a

• Mike Thelwall, Stefanie Haustein, Vincent Larivière, Cassidy R. Sugimoto: Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services. PLOS One, 28 May 2013. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0064841#close

Further reading

Questions and discussion

Next session…

Your identity as a researcher – ORCIDFind out what ORCID is, and how it can help you to distinguish

your work from someone else’s.Friday 26th September, 12.00

Fylde C48

http://researchbites.wordpress.com/