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Altmetrics for Research EvaluationIara Vidal Pereira de Souza (@iaravps)PhD Student, non-practicing LibrarianUniversidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
Summary
What are altmetrics?What do they mean for research evaluation?What are the relationships between altmetrics and openness?
What are altmetrics?
A field: “The creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship” (from altmetrics.org/about/)
A measure: “a social web indicator of an aspect of the value of academic articles” (from M. Thelwall & N. Maflahi, 2015, doi:10.1002/asi.23252)
Altmetrics: a manifesto / J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon (2010)Scholarship’s main filters for importance – peer
review, citation counts, journal impact factor – are failing.
Social Web allows us to follow uses that are invisible to traditional metricsPaper collections go from drawers to online reference
managers, like Mendeley/Zotero;Conversations and debates now also happen on Twitter,
blogs, Facebook...
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/
Altmetrics providers
What they all have in common: output-level metrics from lots of different sources – including traditional ones (citations) and others not related to social media (media outlets, grey literature)
Altmetrics and Research Evaluation: Promise
Go beyond citations and track other impact “flavors”Go beyond academia and track impact over different
audiencesGo beyond the article and track multiple sources
Altmetrics and Research Evaluation: Reality
Some funding agencies are already using altmetrics to support their strategiesWellcome Trust (UK) is one of them (see A. Dinsmore, L.
Allen, K. Dolby, 2014, doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002003)Lack of identifiers makes it hard to get impact data, so many
studies still focus on altmetrics as a way to predict journal article citationsBut progress is coming: see Depsy, a tool for tracking
research software impact from the makers of ImpactStory
But what about openness?
Altmetrics can help open outputs shine (R. Mounce, 2013, doi:10.1002/bult.2013.1720390406)This can be true not only for OA articles and
repositories, but also for open data and OERThe Open Access citation advantage is also observed
with alternative metrics – open wins again!
Altmetrics are open! ... Aren’t they?
According to the manifesto, yes: “They’re open – not just the data, but the scripts and algorithms that collect and interpret it.”
But many sources for altmetric data are closed. Some have APIs (Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook…); others don’t even have that (Google Scholar, anyone?)
So why do I care about altmetrics...
Focus on the alt: not just alternative metrics, outputs, audiences, but also:Alternative scholars (J.P. Alperin, 2013,
doi:10.1002/bult.2013.1720390407): shine a light on research from the periphery
And an alternative way to do research evaluation!Altmetrics are DIVERSE. It is not a single thing with
a single meaning. And impact is diverse too. It can have lots of different flavors.
... And why I think you should care too!
More important than altmetrics themselves is the approach to research evaluation implicit in them:Granularity: judge works by their own merits, not by where they were published.
Variety: not one metric to rule them all, but a fellowship of metrics!
Want to know more?
Search for #altmetrics on TwitterFollow projects that try to create standards
Altmetrics Initiative, lead by the US National Information Standards Organization – NISO (http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/altmetrics_initiative/)
CrossRef’s DOI Event Tracker Pilot (http://det.labs.crossref.org/)
Take a look at the PLOS Altmetrics Collection
