Altmetrics for Libraries: 3 themes

28 feb 2013 Filed under: Research Productivity

As a follow-up to the altmetrics series posted on SwetsBlog last year, let’s take a quick look back at some of the possibilities altmetrics and altmetric tools can bring to the academic institution, research library or really any other organization that manages large amounts of content. This second post in this series will take a short look at a selection of the tools and services out there that are already turning this burgeoning area of study into useful and relevant applications.

1. Disseminating research and making it count

It is certain that a percentage of the output of a researcher should be focused on outreach and dissemination (which can include traditional journal or monograph publishing of course), and what relative impact or influence that research activity has. Altmetrics can inform the success of these activities in terms of quantifying their spread across the web, via public social channels and several other networks and databases. They can help inform us in the following ways:

Looking at the ‘Impact’ of specific content (articles, datasets, video and so on) on the whole web, with a focus on collaborative or social networks, both generalist and subject-specific. ImpactStory is a great tool for this kind of analysis.
Impact of faculty – this is a service libraries could provide in their institutions, helping researchers understand how effectively they are promoting and disseminating their research efforts. A tool such as Mendeley (and its Institutional Edition) can help here by building on the huge amount of metadata and user behavior generated and stored in its data coffers, by virtue of the social aspect to the service.
Impact of departments – this is where benchmarking can work in terms of assessing output versus a competing institution.
Faculty tenure, promotion and grants – some institutions are already looking at other ways researchers are influencing others in their outreach efforts, for example by writing a popular blog about their research. Outreach in this way not only promotes the research itself, but gives both the researchers and the affiliated institution extra web profiling and exposure, and could eventually lead to credit on the researcher's CV which gives tenure, promotion and grant committees more evidence to make decisions with.

2. Collection management and content selection

As pressure mounts on library collections to be managed carefully and decisions based around hard facts, altmetric indicators will never replace other metrics (such as cost, departmental requests etc) for selection management, but new metrics should equally not be ignored. They can already provide fast and up-to-date insights on content popularity (see Mendeley Institutional Edition or Altmetric.com), and we are definitely in the early stages of altmetric tools in the marketplace. Possibilities include:

Social and altmetric data as an extra layer of validation for content selection and management of existing content resources, on top of traditional metrics such as cost per use, cost per user and citation-based quality measures.
Web metrics in the future may be used to judge relative ‘value’ of a journal based on the weighted sum of its footprint online, particularly across common and subject-specific social networks.
Real-time and up-to-date quality data can be obtained from open social networks. When this is used as an addition to the traditional metrics like Impact Factor, (which is always lagging behind), current trends appear more robust to base decisions on, and give a more timely view of what’s popular and what’s not.
Shorter term planning to meet library patrons’ needs better - this could alter the balance of annual library purchasing against patron-driven acquisition (as-and-when mechanisms such as article tokens, eBooks PDA etc).
Social networks, Mendeley included, have huge growth potential – they are usually sitting on sitting enormous datasets of content metadata and user behavior, so it is likely that more layers will be added to provide even more analytical insights, and not just for libraries.

3. Attributing value to repositories

While often only for an internal archiving of content, more and more repositories are open to the world, and open to not only search engines. Altmetric data can easily be recorded and harvested for repository resources, which can help to justify the value in retaining and curating such an online resource.

The maintenance of repositories is often the library’s responsibility and is an essential part of many institutions’ collections. Therefore, demonstrating its value to not only internal stakeholders, but also its relevance to users outside the institution, should be an essential part of the process to make sure its continued existence is partly based firm evidence of relevance and interest.
Aside from basic usage stats, altmetrics can also be looked at for relative impact in terms of how many times the content within the repository is shared by users. Such tools as SocialCrawlytics can identify all resources within a given web domain and return sharing results across the most common social networks. Other services, again such as ImpactStory, can provide this on a more complex level for web services. Check the second post shortly for a summary of how some common altmetric services work in this respect.