Altmetrics14: expanding impacts and metrics

Altmetrics14: expanding impacts and metrics: an ACM Web Science Conference 2014 Workshop
Altmetrics researchers agree: we know how many, now we need to know why

Researchers gathered in Bloomington, Indiana on June 23 to share cutting-edge bibliometrics and altmetrics research at the ACM WebScience Altmetrics14 workshop.

Some of the highlights include a new study that finds that only 6% of articles that appear in Brazilian journals have 1 or more altmetrics (compared with ~20% of articles published in the “global North”); findings that use of Twitter to share scholarly articles grew by more than 90% from 2012 to 2013; a study that found that most sharing of research articles on Twitter occurs in original tweets, not retweets; and a discovery that more biomedical and “layman” terms appear in the titles of research shared on social media than in titles of highly-cited research articles.

Throughout the day, presenters repeatedly emphasized one point: high-quality qualitative research is now needed to understand what motivates individuals to share, bookmark, recommend, and cite research outputs. In other words, we increasingly know how many altmetrics research outputs tend to accumulate and what those metrics’ correlations are–now we need to know why research is shared on the social Web in the first place, and how those motivations influence various flavors of impact.

The ultimate guide to staying up-to-date on your articles’ impact

Useful information from ImpactStory

 

"You published a paper–congrats!  Has anyone read it?  Cited it?  Talked about it on Twitter?  How can you find out–as it happens?

Automated alerts!  Email updates that matter come right to you.

We’ve compiled a two-part primer on the services that deliver essential research impact metrics straight to your inbox, so you can stay up to date without having to do a lot of work.

In this post, we’ll share tips for how to automagically track citations, altmetrics and downloads for your publications; in our next post, we’ll share strategies for tracking similar metrics for your data, code, slides, and social media outreach......."

Altmetrics – fancy feature or peer review’s successor?

An interesting comment on Altmetrics (from Open Science)

"...It is still quite a new phenomenon in scientific publishing, but the idea behind it is simple. When submitting your article online, you would like to know how many people have read it, how many people are talking about it, their opinions and whether your work is important to them. Altmetrics gives you the answer, as well as an opportunity to find out which articles are widely disputed in your field, and could therefore be of significance to you. Moreover, there are also some people who believe that altmetrics could replace the Impact Factor and even peer review.... "

Find out more about Altmetrics

With altmetrics, we can crowdsource peer-review. Instead of waiting months for two opinions, an article’s impact might be assessed by thousands of conversations and bookmarks in a week. In the short term, this is likely to supplement traditional peer-review, perhaps augmenting rapid review in journals like PLoS ONE, BMC Research Notes, or BMJ Open. In the future, greater participation and better systems for identifying expert contributors may allow peer review to be performed entirely from altmetrics. Unlike citation metrics, altmetrics will track impact outside the academy, impact of influential but uncited work, and impact from sources that aren’t peer-reviewed. Some have suggested altmetrics would be too easy to game; we argue the opposite. The JIF is appallingly open to manipulation; mature altmetrics systems could be more robust, leveraging the diversity of of altmetrics and statistical power of big data to algorithmically detect and correct for fraudulent activity. This approach already works for online advertisers, social news sites, Wikipedia, and search engines. 

Universities can improve academic services through wider recognition of altmetrics and alt-products.

From the London School of Economics blog - 15 Oct 2013: 

"As altmetrics gain traction across the scholarly community, publishers and academic institutions are seeking to develop standards to encourage wider adoption. Carly Strasser provides an overview of why altmetrics are here to stay and how universities might begin to incorporate altmetrics into their own services. While this process might take some time, institutions can begin by encouraging their researchers to recognize the importance of all of their scholarly work (datasets, software, etc).

Have you heard of “altmetrics”? If not, you will soon. A movement is descending upon academia that will change the way we consider research outputs and researcher impact. Like any good movement, there is still much debate about what altmetrics means, and how it relates to “article-level metrics” (ALMs). 

But in the interest of writing this blog post, here’s a summary:..................

Citations of research papers

Formula predicts research papers' future citations:  

Mathematical model allows the success of publications — and perhaps scientists — to be forecasted. (Nature:News 3 Oct 2013)

 “It sounds like a science administrator’s dream — or a scientist's worst nightmare: a formula that predicts how often research papers will be cited. But a team of data scientists now says it could be possible. They report today that a simple model allows reasonably accurate predictions of a paper’s future performance on the basis of about five years of its citation history…….”

Some other links which may be of interest:

Halt the avalanche of performance metrics: 

Let's make science metrics more scientific

Metrics: Do metrics matter?

Are scientific reputations boosted artificially?

Metrics: A profusion of measures

What does scientometrics share with other “metrics” sciences?

Do tweets mean higher citations? / New metrics cannot be ignored / Social networking in science....

 (Reading a paper and want to find out its Altmetric details? Install the free bookmarklet for Chrome, Firefox and Safari)

 

Follow @Rhodes Research on Twitter :

(Publications/papers, etc. from all Faculties - updated regularly)  F

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• Social networking tools as public representations of a scientist   presentation by Dr Antony Williams of ChemConnector
  

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• How to build an enduring online research presence using social networking and open science by Dr Titus Brown, a microbiologist from Michigan State University

   

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  Do more tweets mean higher citations?

  Martin Fenner, a medical doctor and cancer researcher at the Hannover Medical School Cancer Center in Germany writes about how the internet is changing scholarly communication

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  The new metrics cannot be ignored – we need to implement centralised impact management systems to understand what these numbers mean 

  Pat Loria compares the new metrics services and argues that as more systems incorporate altmetrics into their platforms, institutions will benefit from creating an impact management system to interpret these metrics, pulling in information from research managers, ICT and systems staff, and those creating the research impact.

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  Altmetrics and Revolutions - Scholarly impact in the age of Web-native scholarship  

  (adapted from Jason Priem’s (one of the founders of ImpactStory) presentation)
  

   Impact Story - share the full story of your research impact

   

   

   

   Altmetric tracks what people are saying about papers online on behalf of institutions, publishers, authors
  

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  Study on arXiv:

   How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted Preprints: Article Downloads, Twitter Mentions, and Citations
  Articles in top quartile by tweets ater 1 week are 11 times more likely to be in the top quartile of citations later

  
  

  
  

'Someone Searched for You': Academia.edu

I have just read this entertaining article (in the Chronicle of HE) by Christopher Phelps, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham, in which he muses on his experiences with Academia.edu since creating a profile.  (For those who have not encountered this site, the developers describe it thus! -  "Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research")

At the end of the article, Phelps' "personal takeaway"  viz.,  "Academia.edu points toward what universities could offer too—a simple way to make our research easily accessible to the public via links on our own homepages. Maybe some universities do, but none I've ever worked at", led me to think of the all opportunities academics and their institutions have in this digital era of promoting their research by means of such tools, including blogs, Twitter and the like.

The RU Library has a LibGuide dedicated to Academic Networking where a number of sites are linked. A quick search shows that the Rhodes community has a profile out there -  e.g. ResearcherID (70 Rhodes members), ResearchGate (348 RU members) Academia.edu (464 RU members).

With regard to using Twitter to promote your research you might like to read this article in the Guardian (How Twitter will revolutionaise academic research and teaching).

Rhodes researchers in PLoS

The PLOS story began in 2000 when its founders set out to tackle the lack of access to the majority of scientific research, which was then published behind pay walls. They startled the American academic science establishment with a petition calling for open access to research findings. Two years later, the team established a new entity called the non-profit Public Library of Science, now known as PLOS, an open access model, and launched its first journal, PLOS Biology. This was followed over the next decade by six other science periodicals that are among the most widely read around the globe.

 Rhodes authors* boast  a total of 12 articles in PLoS - with an h-index (excluding self-citations) of 3.

An interesting tool on PLoS (also available in the journal Nature) is the Article Metrics option which tracks downloads, additions to Mendeley, Cite-u-like, mentions in blogs, etc. 
For example, one of the Rhodes' articles (Hepburn & Radloff) has been viewed (as of today's date) 4744 times with 1081 pdf downloads resulting - fairly impressive! Total number of pdf downloads across the remaining 11 Rhodes' articles is around 1200.

 * (S Baldanzi, CD McMcQuaid, F Porri, VJ Cole, LG Johnson, EA Wieters, CG Palmer, P Neumann, AG Humphries, GI Zardi, HR Hepburn, C Hepburn, SE Radloff, P Teske, I Papadopoulos, NP Barker)

Beyond citations: The impact of your research measured by "ImpactStory"

Following a recent discussion with a Rhodes academic on the impact of his blog posts I decided to investigate this recently-developed (2011) tool which goes beyond traditional publication citation counts. After a simple registration process researchers may seamlessly import up to 1000 publications/data sets, etc.  What metrics are measured? (Mendeley, Cite-u-Like, PLoS and many more). 

ImpactStory is an open-source, web-based service that is designed to make it quick and easy to uncover the impact of research output. Being philanthropically-funded and not-for-profit, this project builds on the belief that open altmetrics are key for building the coming era of Web-native science. (FAQs)