Beyond the Journal Impact Factor: Altmetrics, New Ways of Measuring Impact

Sarah Beasleybeasleys@pdx.edu

PSU Library

Scholarly Communication Coordinator

February 26, 2014

Traditional Impact Factor• Metrics that impute reputation and impact for the journal

based on how frequently articles published in that journal are cited in other published articles.

ISI or Web of Science impact factor• Published annually in the Journal Citation Reports (which

lags by a year, i.e. the most recent JCR data is for 2012)

• # of citations to articles in ABC Journal x during year# of articles published in ABC Journal x in past two years

• 1.0 means that, on average, the articles published in ABC Journal within the past two years have been cited one time. 

Eigenfactor• www.eigenfactor.org

• If a researcher were to go to the library and pick up a random journal article and then randomly follow a cited reference in that article, how much of the time would they be going to X journal. That’s X journal’s eigenfactor.

Scimago• Developed by the major science, technology and

medicine (STM) publisher, Elsevier, from analytics harvested from Elsevier’s Scopus database

• Scimago Journal Ranking is based on the Google Pagerank algorithm

• Measures not just the number of citations to an article but the prestige of the journal in which the citing article appeared

H-index: devised for authors, but can be applied to journals• “The H-index measures

the maximum number of papers N you have, all of which have at least N citations. So if you have 3 papers with at least 3 citations, but you don’t have 4 papers with at least 4 citations then your H-index is 3.”

Google citations

http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html

Alternative metrics• Metrics at the level of the individual article• Facilitated by various web technologies• Can include scholarly commentary:

Article comments, download stats from publishers or full text vendors, institutional repositories (such as PDX Scholar)

• PLOS (page views, downloads, pubmed central usage, scopus, google scholar, crossref citations)

Or social media• News coverage• Blog posts• Tweets• Facebook likes

CategoriesUsage How many times viewed on publisher’s site?

How many times downloaded

Captures How many time bookmarked on CiteULikeHow many times shared in MendeleyRecommender systems

Mentions Blog mentionsNews stories?Wikipedia mentionsHow many comments on publishers’ site

Social Media Facebook likesHow many shares on LinkedInHow many tweets?

Citations Web of ScienceGoogle ScholarGoogle Citations

The Altmetrics tools• Altmetric – actually also a product name. Has been

adopted by among others several prominent STM publishers: Springer, Nature Publishing Group, Scopus, Biomed Central

• Impact Story – Open source altmetric tool. Draws on variety of social and scholarly data sources.

• Plum Analytics – has recently been acquired by Ebsco, focuses on metrics for articles, chapters, datasets, presentations, source code.

• PLOS – has developed its own (freely available) code for deriving metrics

Example: PLOS One www.plosone.org

Example: Biomed Central journals

What’s a researcher to do• ORCID ID – orcid.org

Set up profiles on popular academic sites

• Academic edu• Research Gate• Slideshare• Figshare• Impactstory

• BUT!!!!! Archive in PDX Scholar

Resources• Building an online presence can be exhausting

blog posthttp://tagteam.harvard.edu/hub_feeds/1981/feed_items/250946

• How to Build an enduring online research presence using social networking and open sciencehttp://www.slideshare.net/c.titus.brown/2013-beaconcongresssocialmedia-25245386

• Article Level Metrics: a SPARC PrimerGreg Tananbaum April 2013http://sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/sparc-alm-primer.pdf

Advice•  Building an online presence can be exhausting!

http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hub_feeds/1981/feed_items/250946

•  • “ Sure, there are about 50 ways to disseminate your work online, but

most of them promise to make it a lot easier than they do. So, focus is important. At this point, I let Google Scholar catch my publications and citations (be patient, sometimes it takes a few days!), LinkedIn for my “generic” professional presence (does anybody really take LinkedIn endorsements seriously?), and Twitter for sharing mostly worky things that I think are interesting. Note that I still have some work to do on keeping personal and professional things separate on Twitter. ”

Declaration on Research Assessment

• Am.ascb.org/dora

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), initiated by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals, recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research are evaluated. The group met in December 2012 during the ASCB Annual Meeting in San Francisco and subsequently circulated a draft declaration among various stakeholders. DORA as it now stands has benefited from input by many of the original signers listed below. It is a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines. We encourage individuals and organizations who are concerned about the appropriate assessment of scientific research to sign DORA.