AltMetrics

Capturing the Buzz Bruce Antelman ThinkLoud bruce @ thinkloud.com

For years scientists have been trying to measure the quality of scholarly work

Subjective Qualitative Measures

Peer Recognition - Word of mouth, invited talks Classes - lectures and assigned reading Review articles & Textbooks

Objective quantitative Measures

Journal Citation Counts - Number of times an article is cited in other articles Journal Impact Factor - number of times all articles in a journal are cited in other journals

Altmetrics attempts to use online activity to measure impact, buzz, word of mouth for scientific information and it includes new ways to measure usage at the citation level.

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Counter vs ALM

Counter statistics measure how your institution uses its subscriptions.

AltMetrics measures how the world uses scholarly information and what they think of it.

Two Measures

New ways to measure mentions of scholarly information on Social Media New ways to measure usage at the citation level

AltMetrics Tries to Measure

Viewed - HTML views & downloads Discussed - journal comments, science blogs, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and other social media Saved - Mendeley, CiteULike and other social bookmarks Cited - citations in the scholarly literature, tracked by Web of Science, Scopus, CrossRef and others Recommended - for example Computing Reviews & Faculty of 1000 • ImpactStory [3] and the Public Library of Science [4]

AltMetrics - More than Articles

Traditional articles & books Objects in papers - figures, graphs, pictures Software Tools - GitHub Datasets - Dryad or figshare Molecular structures algorithms Slideshows - SlideShare Grants Patents Mentions in popular Media, blogs and Social media More

AltMetrics - Measures

Still more valuable sources to cover - classes, seminars, lectures, posters, journal clubs and more. Aggregation is difficult - data in many formats, stored in different ways, in many places, some not accessible (NISO standard being developed).

Author names are not standard and multiple copies of media under different names - ORCID, Data One, BioShare Many covered sources have open APIs or special arrangements made to access their data

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AltMetrics - Who Does It

Plum Analytics - Service provider with API. Profile page and analytics. Say the cover more Metric sources than anyone else Impact Story - Displays data in a CV like format. Could become the Linked-In for Scientists. Has API.

PLOS - One of the first publishers to use article level metrics. One of the current leaders. Has API.

Altmetric.com - Service provider with API for publishers, bibliographic websites and more. also offer bookmarklet.

AltMetrics - Benefits

Reader - way to identify new, interesting current works and people Authors - way to get recognition for work besides articles Publishers - way to measure “success” of publications and to identify new authors and topics and more information for citation page Grantors & Universities - may become an additional metrics to use for grants, hiring and promotion, but not yet Bibliographic Databases - Another information element to display with the citation

AltMetrics - Problems

Buzz Can Be Manipulated - Promoting your work is frowned up by some, will it soon promoting your work will be part of the PhD Curriculum.

Academics, especially scientists, don ’t use Social Media like the Public, though they do use some tools. There isn ’t enough data to give a balanced picture, though this might be changing.

Jerry Letvin: “the best ideas in science aren’t recognized at first. this type of work (referring to reviews) just reinforces the prevailing view ’. How would Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity score altmetricaly if it was published today?

Grantor “While I think that there are some good tools and interesting strategies out there, to evaluate productivity and impact, they are basically making value judgments but real life is more complex. ‘Success‘ is a difficult quantify and there is a significant amount of luck and unpredictability.

” (6) Over reliance on metrics is natural and inevitable.

AltMetrics - Future

Combining different types of measures may lead to more accuracy - like chemotherapy Discovery tools for readers more sources, better algorithms, sentiment analysis Applied science may get a boost over theoretical Might influence scientists to use more social media Almetrics deployed inside institution to identify what buzz is Over reliance on almetrics is inevitable

AltMetrics - Library ’s role

Become the expert at your institution help readers learn how to use altmetrics to identify what/who is new and interesting Identify media to add to your library ’s collection Measure what the buzz is inside your institution Measure what is being said about your institution on the web Work more closely with other groups in your institution who use social metrics If you find value in altmetrics tell publishers to add them

AltMetrics

Capturing the Buzz Bruce Antelman ThinkLoud bruce @ thinkloud.com