Part I: Altmetrics landscape, impact and value
In an earlier post on the SwetsBlog, we explored the many metrics and techniques that can be used in a full journal collection analysis within a library. Usage, cost and other quantitative data sources were explained against qualitative recommendations from faculty, students and the traditional measure of a journal’s impact, based on citations.
But what of the explosion of interest in new metrics, that are revealing new forms of impact? Not only are they gathering momentum and increasing media coverage, but several spin-off projects and commercial organisations have already formed and are providing very real services to their communities. Enter the altmetrics.
What’s an altmetric?
Altmetrics are new measurements for the impact of scholarly content, based on how far and wide it travels through the social web (like Twitter), social bookmarking (e.g. CiteULike) and collaboration tools (such as Mendeley). Read the manifesto here: http://altmetrics.org
What altmetrics hope to do is provide an alternative measure of impact, distinct from the Journal Impact Factor, which has been categorically misused and is unable to respond effectively to the digital environment that scholarship takes place in today. Altmetrics attempt to reveal real-time visibility into the depth of penetration for an article, journal or researcher into the online environment.
Web citations vs traditional closed-circuit journal citations?
Impact, when restricted to citations in other scholarly publications, is obviously only capturing a part of the story. Citations [mostly] only deal with journal articles, which are confined to journals. This excludes an enormous proportion of the total research output for a given project, leaving out data sets, blog posts, slideshows and so on.
altmetrics may offer insights into impact that have never been possible before
Outreach = impact
What is increasingly clear is that universities, as well as individual authors, are under more pressure to demonstrate outreach by making their research output more accessible by the wider world, not just their academic peers. For instance, in the UK and Australia, performance frameworks are well established, which attempt to show research quality, a part of which is real world relevance (see REF and ERA sites for details). They are also pivotal for an institution to secure funding from the government.
Demonstrating outreach could be measured by how much impact research output is having on the two sets of communities – scientific peers on the one hand, and the lay audience on the other (there is a set of intermediaries here, namely the journalists and other communicators making the ideas accessible to these non-specialist audiences). Being able to measure the inclusive impact of a piece of research is therefore rather important. This is where altmetrics may offer insights into impact that have never been possible before.
Who is doing altmetrics?
One of the services that has already been developed is the open source (and not-for profit) Total-Impact, which started as a research project, and was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant earlier this year to fund substantial growth in the capabilities of the tool and to help grow its user base. Total-Impact pulls together data from various open online sources to illustrate the web impact of a journal paper, dataset or anything else that is compatible and hosted in a fixed location online. Data sources include Twitter, Mendeley, Delicious, CiteULike, F1000 reviews, PMC citations, Github, SlideShare and a plethora of other online services.
Another service which has won a spot in the altmetric limelight is Altmetric.com, which harvests similar data around journal articles, and creates a single score comprised of differently weighted input from the component data sources. In 2011 this service won the Elsevier Apps for Science Challenge to build an application on top of the underlying data held within ScienceDirect. They have now launched paid services for publishers, individuals and teams.
Other services can be found on the altmetrics.org site here: http://altmetrics.org/tools/
The big value
It is clear that this ‘bigger picture’ approach to looking at impact holds value to many groups of stakeholders, none less than the research community who are increasingly frustrated of the inaccuracies of the impact factor (see recent post from Stephen Curry for example). Big data is big news, and the social web is one enormous pile of data that is now being mined and organised by forward-thinking individuals and organisations.
It is an interesting area of study and experimentation, and it will no doubt become increasingly more important as a measure for anything from a single journal article up to country level.
In Part II of this series of altmetrics blog posts, I talk to Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem from Total-Impact about specific benefits altmetrics may be able to provide to librarians and information professionals as measures of impact and value, and how they may be used productively.
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Read Parts II & III of the Altmetrics for Librarians and Institutions blog series here:
Leave us your comments below.
Altmetrics for Librarians and Institutions: Part I
29 aug 2012 Filed under: Research ProductivityPart I: Altmetrics landscape, impact and value
In an earlier post on the SwetsBlog, we explored the many metrics and techniques that can be used in a full journal collection analysis within a library. Usage, cost and other quantitative data sources were explained against qualitative recommendations from faculty, students and the traditional measure of a journal’s impact, based on citations.
But what of the explosion of interest in new metrics, that are revealing new forms of impact? Not only are they gathering momentum and increasing media coverage, but several spin-off projects and commercial organisations have already formed and are providing very real services to their communities. Enter the altmetrics.
What’s an altmetric?
Altmetrics are new measurements for the impact of scholarly content, based on how far and wide it travels through the social web (like Twitter), social bookmarking (e.g. CiteULike) and collaboration tools (such as Mendeley). Read the manifesto here: http://altmetrics.org
What altmetrics hope to do is provide an alternative measure of impact, distinct from the Journal Impact Factor, which has been categorically misused and is unable to respond effectively to the digital environment that scholarship takes place in today. Altmetrics attempt to reveal real-time visibility into the depth of penetration for an article, journal or researcher into the online environment.
Web citations vs traditional closed-circuit journal citations?
Impact, when restricted to citations in other scholarly publications, is obviously only capturing a part of the story. Citations [mostly] only deal with journal articles, which are confined to journals. This excludes an enormous proportion of the total research output for a given project, leaving out data sets, blog posts, slideshows and so on.
Outreach = impact
What is increasingly clear is that universities, as well as individual authors, are under more pressure to demonstrate outreach by making their research output more accessible by the wider world, not just their academic peers. For instance, in the UK and Australia, performance frameworks are well established, which attempt to show research quality, a part of which is real world relevance (see REF and ERA sites for details). They are also pivotal for an institution to secure funding from the government.
Demonstrating outreach could be measured by how much impact research output is having on the two sets of communities – scientific peers on the one hand, and the lay audience on the other (there is a set of intermediaries here, namely the journalists and other communicators making the ideas accessible to these non-specialist audiences). Being able to measure the inclusive impact of a piece of research is therefore rather important. This is where altmetrics may offer insights into impact that have never been possible before.
Who is doing altmetrics?
One of the services that has already been developed is the open source (and not-for profit) Total-Impact, which started as a research project, and was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant earlier this year to fund substantial growth in the capabilities of the tool and to help grow its user base. Total-Impact pulls together data from various open online sources to illustrate the web impact of a journal paper, dataset or anything else that is compatible and hosted in a fixed location online. Data sources include Twitter, Mendeley, Delicious, CiteULike, F1000 reviews, PMC citations, Github, SlideShare and a plethora of other online services.
Another service which has won a spot in the altmetric limelight is Altmetric.com, which harvests similar data around journal articles, and creates a single score comprised of differently weighted input from the component data sources. In 2011 this service won the Elsevier Apps for Science Challenge to build an application on top of the underlying data held within ScienceDirect. They have now launched paid services for publishers, individuals and teams.
Other services can be found on the altmetrics.org site here: http://altmetrics.org/tools/
It is clear that this ‘bigger picture’ approach to looking at impact holds value to many groups of stakeholders, none less than the research community who are increasingly frustrated of the inaccuracies of the impact factor (see recent post from Stephen Curry for example). Big data is big news, and the social web is one enormous pile of data that is now being mined and organised by forward-thinking individuals and organisations.
It is an interesting area of study and experimentation, and it will no doubt become increasingly more important as a measure for anything from a single journal article up to country level.
In Part II of this series of altmetrics blog posts, I talk to Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem from Total-Impact about specific benefits altmetrics may be able to provide to librarians and information professionals as measures of impact and value, and how they may be used productively.
Get the latest blog articles:
Sign up for blog email alerts | Grab the RSS | Follow on Twitter
Read Parts II & III of the Altmetrics for Librarians and Institutions blog series here:
Leave us your comments below.
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